Buona Sera. Louis Prima. 1956. Capitol.

 Like Bobby Darin’s Mack the Knife or Sinatra’s Summer Wind, Louis Prima’s Buona Sera’s appeal resonates with both the music audience for which it was first marketed as well as with the  generations that came afterwards, who hear in its pop arrangement wisps of an artistic tradition going back to the progenitor of modern American pop music, Louis Armstrong. A native of New Orleans and the son of Italian immigrants, Prima was keenly aware of the primal significance that mongrelization played in the creation of the live, aboriginal music he heard played in the venues he frequented growing up. “Like many millions of people, I am a bastard child of history,” said Salman Rushdie; “perhaps we all are…(the soul of democracy hinges precariously on that ‘perhaps’).” So it goes with music, our music. If miscegenation for the advancement of love and the civic betterment of a nation is the truest realization of a living democracy, then the admixture of pop genres is the music that inevitably follows that realization. The history of Greek mythology is born when Leda is raped by the swan; American mythology, when Jefferson rapes Sally Hemings. The intersection of violence and powerlessness at the heart of most American lives makes our favorite records all the more poignant for tapping into distant, fleeting emotions—joy, happiness—that buoy the human experience. We live in a time of vast paranoia when rumors of imminent existential erasure run rampant with the same viral velocity that transmits Prima’s boisterous good news. In 1985, when David Lee Roth released his version of another Louis Prima hit, Prima’s LP The Wildest, the LP that had been the source for both songs, was almost thirty years old. Today, almost another forty years separates us from that over-bright remake, which Roth succeeded in translating for a mid-eighties audience by leaving much of the original material intact; you can hear how much Roth the unabashed showman is thoroughly enjoying himself by teasing the commercial potential from a song that jumped and wailed while his cradle rocked. What makes Buona Sera such an endlessly charming record is that Prima was an artistic personality not only at home in his era, but at home in the recording studio too. He’s so relaxed a performer that there’s nothing foreign about his delivery three quarters of a century later; Buona Sera is so fresh it sounds more contemporary in the twenty first century than Brian Setzer’s next record will. There are questions about nostalgia, however, that listening to Buona Sera in 2023 raises. How differently do ears new to rock and roll hear music from that golden age; do fans of Sunn O))) listen to Sister Ray and Metal Machine Music and smile to themselves condescendingly, knowingly? Has human darkness become relative?

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