Sam Butera: Keeping Vegas Swing and that Ol’ Black Magic of Louis Prima Alive

Originally published in Discoveries magazine, November, 2004

In the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s, Vegas knew how to swing. In fact, that was what Las Vegas was all about. The lounges and the skills of the players on their stages were every bit as important as the casinos. Music gave that town life. It injected it with a jazz sensibility that couldn’t be found anywhere else.

Jazz was evolving into all the things it was to become, and Chicago and New York were its most notable home bases. But it was the swinging jazz from its own birthplace of New Orleans that took on another life all its own just a few states over to the west.

Two men came up in New Orleans, developed their skills there and elsewhere, and took their music to Las Vegas, where they could swing, man.

Louis Prima was the reigning King of Vegas Swing. He still is, actually, even a quarter century after his death. Nobody ever replaced him, and besides, entertainment there is different now, with magic shows and stage spectaculars.

It’s the other man from New Orleans who is doing his best to keep the sound alive, the sound that he created with Prima, his mentor and partner. Sam Butera is still at it, wailing away on the saxophone wherever and whenever he can.

For decades, he and the Witnesses, and Keely Smith, and later on, Gia Maione Prima, supported Louis Prima for his wild shows, all integral parts of the show and the hits, like “That Ol’ Black Magic,” “When You’re Smiling,” and “I Ain’t Got Nobody/Just A Gigolo.” Together, they were the greatest live musical attraction in the country. Sam Butera was Clarence Clemons to Prima’s Springsteen, fulfilling an important personal role as Energetic Stage Sidekick and an even greater role as Sax Player Extraordinaire.

Butera still calls Vegas home, but he knows it for what it is now. “It’s not entertainment anymore. It’s slot machines. Remember this used to be called the Entertainment Capital of the World? Ain’t no more now, man. It’s the Magician’s Capital of the World.”

He does manage to find some stages to play, though, mostly in casino towns like Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi and Yuma, Arizona. He also recently opened a series of shows in Europe for one of his great admirers, Van Morrison. Wherever he plays, he keeps the sound alive, the one that he and Prima created together. He does it in the format of a classic Vegas show, and it’s as close as any audience member will get to the real thing from a bygone era. Sam interacts with the audience, tells jokes, improvises with all the members of his band, The Wildest, and swings with high energy. The whole show is up, fun, and positive-just like it was with Louis.

In fact, very little has changed since those days with Louis. “People want to hear the music that they know us for; ‘Gigolo,’ ‘Jump, Jive, and Wail,’ ‘Oh Babe,’ ‘Night Train,’ all those things,” says Butera. “I do a medley of all the things that Louis did in the Forties. People love it.”

Fan, friend, and promoter, Ron Cannatella has experienced that old black magic of a Sam Butera show. “I was just recently watching a tape of Sam with Louis, then [went] to see Sam right after that, and nothing has changed. He still looks the same and still sounds the same. He’s an ageless kind of guy. He can get out there and deliver a show, and deliver those songs, and play that saxophone. At the end of his shows, he does ‘When The Saints Go Marching In.’ Just like Louis did, he parades out into the audience and while he’s playing the saxophone, he’s shaking hands, smiling at the people. And he makes people happy.”

It’s fortuitous enough that the younger man of the two can keep their special brand of Hot Swing going into the Twenty First century (Butera is 77; Prima would have been 93 by now), but it’s even more fortunate that they found each other in the first place.

Though perhaps not too surprising. Years before joining Prima, Butera had his own hit records, “Easy Rockin’” and “Chicken Scratch.” They appeared as dance tunes on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show Of Shows.” In 1946, he was honored by Look magazine as the number one teenage musician in America, which landed him onstage at Carnegie Hall.

Did such prestigious early musical experiences put him on Easy Street? “No! I just kept working, man. Listen, the music business is a very tough business, man. Nobody gives you nothin’. You get out there and you fight. That’s why I never got my kids interested in music.”

The scrappy horn player found lots of work in a big band setting right there in his New Orleans hometown. It was the big band era, and there was plenty of opportunity for someone who could play the saxophone and the clarinet equally well.

At one point, Sam was offered the chance to join the great Louis Armstrong, and an offer from Louis Prima came at virtually the same time. Armstrong wanted him to play the clarinet, and Prima wanted him to play the saxophone. He went with Louis Prima because he was more driven to play the saxophone. It’s where his passion was.

Prima’s widow and musical partner, Gia Maione Prima, explains the story of how her husband first found the man who would share the stage with him over the next several decades: “Leon Prima [brother of Louis] owned the 500 Club in New Orleans on Bourbon Street and he had some of the world’s greatest strippers that performed there, so he had a house band that played behind his strippers. Sam was in that band. When Louis was in town and visiting Leon at the 500 Club, he heard Sam. So when he got to Vegas and put together the Witnesses he felt as though he really needed a strong front man with him. He called Leon, and Leon put him in touch with Sam. It was the night before Christmas Eve and Louis said, ‘Sam I need you. I want you here tonight!’ And Sam said, ‘Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve!’ [Louis] said, ‘That’s good enough!’ Sure enough,1954, Sam joined Louis Christmas Eve.”

Spontaneous as that first performing encounter was, it was also part of a grander plan that Louis Prima had been developing. He had already had great success with his own orchestra and then his own big band during the previous few decades.

Prima had achieved all had wanted to in those ensembles. It was time to create a swinging Wall Of Sound. And Big Band had run its course. “That era was gone, man,” remembers Butera. “That was history. They were trying to hang on with the big band, but it was costly. He knew that that era was gone. He knew it was a thing of the past. And thank God the thing we put together right quick happened.”

The thing they put together was magic-and the best reason for a trip to Vegas. “Louis and I, Keely, it happened, man. At one time we were the greatest attraction in the world, bar none.” The new sound was a new genre unto itself, based on Louis’ shuffle beat, accompanied by Sam’s rock and roll backgrounds.

For years, they let the world come to them, as they traveled back and forth between Reno, Lake Tahoe, and Las Vegas. When “That Ol’ Black Magic” became a huge national hit, Los Angeles and New York were incorporated into the schedule. Prima had a personal reason to limit their travel. “Louis wouldn’t fly,” says Sam. “I told Louis one time, ‘When we gonna go to Europe?’ You know what he told me? ‘When they build a bridge!’”

The lounges outside the big rooms and the casinos featured free performances, allowing patrons to wander in and out while gambling. “If a guy came in to gamble, his wife didn’t want to stand at the table, so they’d put her in the lounge. Nobody would bother her. That’s what the lounges were for at first.”

When Prima, Smith, Butera, and the Witnesses took the stage up to five times a night in those lounges, it was electrifying, and the spontaneity is what guaranteed its high energy.

Prima presided over the musical mayhem. “Nothin’ was set. You’d get on stage and you’d go,” remembers Sam. In the jazz tradition, Prima would entrust every musician onstage with his own improvisational turn at the spotlight. “He didn’t turn his back on anyone.”

It was all still intact when the Prima/Smith era came to an end, and Prima’s new wife, Gia Maione, took on the vocalist and sidekick duties in the early Sixties. Sam and Louis had been at it for a decade by then, and Gia confirms that it was still fresh and new, thanks largely to the talents of the sax man. “I have a lot of wonderful things to say about Sam, and just how skilled and how seriously he took his instrument. People don’t really know that, but every night I’d hear him running scales and fingering for a couple of hours before the show. He’d be back there warming up and making sure all of these reeds were perfect. He was a stickler on that instrument. I really believe that he’s the greatest tenor sax player that ever lived. And how he could move like he moved and play at the same time and play extremely well. I don’t think I ever heard him play a bad note, not ever.”

Sam Butera has fantastic memories of some of the most exciting, spontaneous moments of their show, which sometimes involved the headlining acts from the big rooms, who would check out the lounge show when their own was finished. “When they’d get off work they had to come see us. One night we were working on stage, and Sammy Davis comes in. ‘Louis, stop the show! Stop the show! I got a song for Sam!’ Louis says, ‘What does he want?’ I said, ‘He said he’s got a song for me.’ And Louis said, ‘What is it, Sam?’ And he said, [singing] ‘Chantilly lace and a pretty face, and a pony tail, hangin’ down.’ Remember that one? Well, he stopped the show and he started singing that. You never knew what he was gonna do!”

Davis saw Butera as Prima did, as a musician’s musician. Which is how the two Sams came together to make a swinging classic of their own, an album called When The Feeling Hits You, which captured a feeling that hit both entertainers on just one particular night. “We did that record after we both got off of work. It was about four hours and we were done. You don’t hear that no more! We didn’t start ‘til about three o’clock. After the session was over, the sunshine was on, early in the morning.”

Butera went on to work with other major acts who respected his talent, one of whom was the Chairman of the Board. “He called me, he said, ‘Sam, we’re gonna record.’ I said, ‘What?’ ‘Yeah, we’re gonna record.’ He flew me into LA, to Reprise Records, and we recorded two tunes. He was wonderful.”

Sam also toured with Sinatra as his opening act. “Only thing you had to do, if he told you to do thirteen minutes, don’t do thirteen and a half. That’s right, man, I’m telling ya. But he was great to me, too. I lived a charmed life, at times tough, but most of the time, these great entertainers who I worked with were wonderful people, great people who had a lot of feeling.”

The greatest person with whom he played, of course, was the one who stuck by him through thick and thin, from the Fifties to the Seventies. His fondest memories and his greatest admiration are reserved for Louis. “Louis Prima was the greatest, man. I got nothin’ but praise for him. I’ve never seen a man write lyrics the way he did, right off the top of his head. You know the ‘Greenback Dollar Bill’? You know who did ‘Greenback Dollar Bill’ before me? Ray Charles. Louis stretched it out, he added lyrics to it, to make it a story. Same thing with ‘Next Time,’ and the same thing with ‘How Come My Dog Don’t Bark When You Come Around.’ That’s true man. He wrote all those lyrics. He was incredible.”

The wonderful years with Louis Prima came to an end in 1975, when Prima went into a coma, in which he would remain until his death in 1978. Before and since, Sam kept swinging, with shows and recordings of his own. He still has his own version of The Witnesses, called The Wildest, with whom he can take any song and turn it into an up-tempo, big band, swinging jazz experience. On one of his CDs, The Whole World Loves Italians, he took Willie Nelson’s “On The Road Again” and made it swing. That’s what Louis would have done.

Sam Butera doesn’t analyze his musical career too much; he’s just a workingman who has always loved his job. The fact that his talent became part of such an important piece of American music history was a fortunate accident, as he sees it. “It just happened. Boom. It was great. It was the thrill of my life. I wish I could do it again, Lord knows I do. The only thing I can say is I’ve had a ball.”