teaching mark s a *LESSON* response four: LOUIS PRIMA

Proposed by Martin Skidmore

In Trevor Griffiths?s 1976 tv play Comedians, the middle-aged stand-up is giving nightclasses, in some godforsaken technical college in Manchester, to a handful of wannabe funnymen.

Retired and disillusioned himself, he pours crafts and convictions into a new generation of hopefuls. They want success, fame, security - but way beyond all this they hunger, desperately, for flight from backbreaking rubbish meaningless working class toil, the grim awfulness of their lives. He wants them to know and understand what he believes: that while good comedy may be about knowing and using the established craft conventions, great comedy is about truth. It isn?t a distraction from pain: it?s an exploration of the wounds, perhaps even a step towards healing?

And it?s the night of their big chance: a talent-spotter is up from London ? one of them will get to leave the pitiful local workingman?s club circuit, to play Music Hall countrywide, maybe even get on television. How will they handle it?

The play predates Alternative Comedy in the UK; it was surely a catalyst for its arrival, though, and it perfectly predicts its dilemmas, its compromises. It?s about selling out your principles, and - nobbled by the talent spotter, an old enemy of the stand-up - EVERY SINGLE ONE of the would-be comics betrays his teacher, each one in a different way, by being rubbish, by being unprincipled (telling easy and ugly stereotype jokes, racist and sexist and cynically cliched), and ? in the most complicated betrayal ? by being absolutely principled and politically hard (about class and hatred) but not, in fact, being funny.

The final betrayal is the conflict-nub of play, clearly: what this "stand-up" (he?s called Gethin Price) does is utterly daring and scary "performance art", playing on the Historical Social Role of the Licensed Jester blah blah, *but* Price pisses on his teacher also. Because what he says is that, morally, truth-in-the-service-of-radical-social-value simply demolishes the entire idea of "funny". If poetry can?t survive Auschwitz, how the fuck will Stand-up?

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Louis Prima (1910-78, born and died New Orleans) was a Louis Armstrong copyist of Italian lineage who just squeaks into jazz encyclopaedias by virtue of unimpeachable undeniable astonishing jawdropping vocal technique, only to be IMMEDIATELY consigned to don?t-bother footnote territory by the encyclopaedias with pretensions to SERIOUSNESS, for being an entertainer not an innovator, a showbiz trouper not an artist (in his book Satchmo, for example, Gary Giddens claims that you can trace Prima?s entire career to what Armstrong does with the version of "I Surrender Dear" that he recorded in Chicago in 1931). In other words, Prima gets dealt with as if he?s nothing but prime Las Vegas jazzcheeze; you only ever find his records under "Easy Listening" ? the collection I bought for this, I assume part of some cheapie primer series for elderly 12-CDers, lists no other musicians (except wife and sometime co-singer Keely Smith), only dates half of them, and uses a single very weirdly colorized photo no less than four times on the two sides of the insert (weirdly colorized: as in, Prima?s suit ? which judging by texture seems to be made of some kind of slimming crispbread ? is given a tinge of turquoise that turns his face diseased and purple...).

And of course, as Amiri Baraka and Wynton Marsalis wd both agree to note through gritted teeth with unending not-unreasonably anger, Prima?s white, and hey didn?t he do King Louis?s voice in Disney?s "Jungle Book" which is great and all but but but ew argh ugh.....

The specific Prima song medley Martin pointed me to was "Basin Street Blues"/"When It?s Sleepy Time Down South" (rec.for Capitol 1956) => In other words, a medley of two of the most important songs from Armstrong?s 1928 recordings, which rocketed him up to join the world-historical greats. (Giddins says that Armstrong went on record the former 53 times, his third most rerecorded song; and the latter, his declared themetune, 98 times!)

Anyway, the point I?m crawling towards is that I think we live in an era in music where the actual thing that Prima does with his voice, right here at the heart of unapologetically mainstream pre-rock leisure culture (most of the songs on my collection were released on Capitol in the mid-late 50s), could *not* NOW emerge from R&B or hiphop or metal or indie or gospel or any of jazz, trad to improv, COULD NOT POSSIBLY HAPPEN IN ANY KIND OF "WESTERN"* "POP"**, however trivial, however learned, however whatever. Along with the arrival of the basic cultural tact NOT to associate Armstrong with a comical cartoon monkey (which I think we can agree is a step forward, somehow, no?), did something go missing? "Rock" knows more than the world before it, yes, but it just doesn?t know this ? the supremely casual way Prima can just take a beat and play with it, around it, through it, via free-improv rhythm and babbled syllable shifts (half Armstrong dreamchatter, half Neapolitan slang), jumpcutting us out of the body of one song into another, hair-raising hairpin bends taken in supremely cheerful and unbothered style ? yes of course like Armstrong except freed from the ghastly prison of half his listeners thinking "this guy changed the course of music history you know". It?s not Cap-A Art, it?s not show-off "technique for the sake of technique", it?s *so* not trapped inside any idea whatever of Higher Social Worth. There?s no countercultural crusade here (including obviously no Marsalisoid counter-countercultural crusade); the only conventions are vaudeville?s pragmatic-mercenary laws viz GRAB THE AUDIENCE AND HOLD THEM AND TAKE THEM WHERE I TAKE THEM. He sings cheesy standards; he is in NO SENSE the author of his wider context (let alone at war with this context). So in a way Prima ? with this beautiful lazy, funny, easy, joyful shtick, as brilliantly bubblicious as like, I don?t know, Bootsy, except in an ABSOLUTELY unpoliced and unabsolved, uncareful-unpolitical-unartful context ? is as true to his principles, the exact material craft of his calling, as Gethin Price, and therefore, somehow, up there on-stage grinning in Vegas, even *more* heroically uncompromised. (Did he betray HIS teacher? Well, DID he? I mean, did anyone ever so perfectly recognise and celebrate and adore the exact magnificent power of what their teacher achieved? In a way, isn?t the entire history of jazz the story of people foolishly attempting to improve on Armstrong when he SO DOESN?T NEED IMPROVING ON?)

So (as usual) the question comes down to, what is lost with the arrival of self-consciousness? How d?you recover the wonder, if you decide the world needs changing? If everything is locked into the ahem Revolution, how d?you ever imagine freedom again, let alone express an idea of it? Whatever the answer (ps i don?t know it) it?s totally NOT about eliminating all schooling: Prima is like TOTALLY A SCHOOLED MASTER of what he does, of the technical perfection of his own talent (except that makes it sound cold when it SO isn?t...): more than this, he "got" rhythm and blues when it first emerged, unlike pretty much everyone in GROWN-UP jazz, white OR black (AND haha Keely Smith recorded an LP of Beatles covers in 1964!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

(*cf this thread for what is meant here maybe by "western", acknowledging that it is a vague and therefore incredibly risky and dumb and potentially bothersome word in many many ways) (I mean, like, how is EEK-A-MOUSE not "western" etc?)

(**Exception: in principle, just about, could a present-day Prima actually emerge from eg the talent-show reality-TV er "hell" of American Idol et al, where just enough of the "old" leisure-industry craft values are fleetingly given the nod ? except that of course it?s actually totally imbued with and in thrall to "counterculture" and "cool" values... ??)