4. Louis Prima - The Wildest! (1956)

 

B+

Now here's an album that lives up to its title. There's not much to say about it really. It's not deep music. It's just plain fun. Prima rambles in a bizarre concoction of Italian, Louis Armstrong impressions, and free form nonsense scatting. Keely Smith's voice is just gorgeous. The trumpets and saxophone are flawless. And backing all this up you have a rock-solid, incredibly propulsive rhythm section. If you can listen to this without bopping along and tapping your toes, you may want to consult a physician.

Apparently the goal with this album was to capture the experience of Prima's Vegas live show. I'd say they succeeded admirably. Listening to this album I felt like I was hanging out with a bunch of cool, funny, incredibly talented people who wanted nothing more than to make sure that everyone had a great time. And I did. How can you not like something as silly as "The Lip"? Or the incredible danceable "Jump, Jive, an' Wail". At one point in a song the saxophonist starts quoting from "In the Hall of the Mountain King", just for a laugh. It's great.

Anyway, I'm not going to belabour this. Sometimes you can say a lot about something and sometimes you can't.  If I wrote an essay on every album I'd be here till Doomsday. This album is just dumb fun.

 It's also notable just how Italian this album is. At the time, that was kind of a big deal. I recall reading in a book on jazz once that for a long time there were elements of the Italian-American jazz community who tried to claim that jazz was an Italian invention. The evidence doesn't really bear this out, but this album does show that Italian-Americans made important contributions to the art form. From a modern perspective, with all the attention focused on differences between different races such as White and Black and Asian, it can be easy to forget that not so long ago the dividing line wasn't White versus everyone else, but WASP versus everyone else. I mean, it was a big deal when Kennedy got elected because he was Catholic. Not to suggest that everyone had it equally bad. It's just interesting to see how something that seems so normal now (a big Italian guy playing upbeat jazz and blues) was once a pretty big deal.

Anyway, I think I will be keeping this album around. It's wonderfully joyful, fun music.

Best Songs: "Just a Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody"; "The Lip"; "Jump, Jive, an' Wail".