New Orleans-born trumpeter and singer Louis Prima,was one of the great avatars of an era in pop music when comedy was as important as romance, when even top stars like Sinatra and Doris Day were expected to sing novelties as much as ballads.

Generations of Italian-American and other rock and pop stars have cited Prima as an inspiration, including Dion DiMucci, who said "Prima would have been the first guy inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame if he didn't sing in Italian." Sinatra modeled the Rat Pack on Prima's act, and Elvis Presley said that he "learned some of his best moves" from him. Sonny and Cher took the Louis Prima  and Keely Smith  act and draped it in hippie drag. 

The Wall Street Journal, Will Friedwald; January 6, 2011 
Close friends of the New Orleans-born trumpeter and singer Louis Prima, whose centennial arrived in December, say that it was his benevolent but domineering mother who taught him to "never let your left hand know what your right hand is doing." It's easy to see how that adage applied to his love life, but it even more readily describes Prima's music. The man was always doing many things at once, often in direct contradiction with one another. 

"Felicia No Capicia" is a classic example of Prima showing this contradiction in the most entertaining way possible. He introduced this Italian-American comedy song in 1945, first recording it commercially and then, a few months later, singing it on Frank Sinatra's radio show. Good as the original 78 rpm version is, the live performance (which survives as an aircheck) captures an artist who is even more dynamic and supercharged with Neapolitan magnetism. 

He's swinging to a hard- driving beat here, big-band-era style, and showing that he is a major jazz vocalist-instrumentalist to compete with his namesakes, Louis Armstrong and Louis Jordan. Yet at the same time, there's more than a hint of the Italian tarantella  in the underlying rhythm. Somehow, he makes both work together. In the lyrics, Prima, as he does in most of his "Italian" songs, presents himself as a gullible baciagaloop, always letting his girlfriends"beautiful, intelligent women" wrap him around their little fingers. (Felicia, for instance, spends all of his money, but every time he tries to get a kiss, she pretends not to speak English.) Yet even though he's playing a sexually frustrated fall guy, a Sicilian schlemiel,  Prima's throaty singing is amazingly erotic. If this tale were a movie, Prima would be both the leading man and the comic relief.

Prima (1910-1978) was one of the great avatars of an era in pop music when comedy was as important as romance, when even top stars like Sinatra and Doris Day were expected to sing novelties as much as ballads. By the 1960s, pop began to take itself increasingly seriously, and though it never completely lost its sense of humor, the great musical clowns became gradually marginalized. It's no coincidence that Nat King Cole started his career singing rhythmic novelties but gradually switched to romantic love songs; Jimmy Durante, at the end of his career, was crooning ballads rather than shouting "Umbriago!"

Prima kept current through the 1960s. Among other things, he created his most enduring film role by supplying the voice and personality for King Louie in Disney's "The Jungle Book." Yet there's a clip from a 1971 TV appearance in the newly released DVD "Louis Prima in Person" where Prima has modernized as much as he can, having added electric organ to his mix. His music is still swinging-itself no longer an asset by 1971- but Prima himself, dressed in a blue bell-bottom suit and sporting a Beatle haircut, seems like a man who has outlived his moment.

Less than a decade after his death, Prima would be current again, beginning when David Lee Roth cloned his signature medley of "Just a Gigolo" and "I Ain't Got Nobody." A few years after that, Prima's own 1956 recording of "Jump, Jive, and Wail" would become the soundtrack of a TV commercial and the national anthem of the retro swing movement. His music is heard on innumerable soundtracks (the Internet Movie Database lists a mere 118, mostly from the past 15 years), and other movies, like the 1996 comedy "Big Night," fetishize his very existence.

In addition to the new DVD, Prima's centennial brings with it a new CD, "Rarities & Hits (1963-1975)," and a BBC documentary. And Prima is now highly regarded enough to have been immortalized by a statue (in Legends Park, in the French Quarter), and inspired an academic colloquium (at Tulane University) in which I participated. Also in honor of the 100th anniversary, Prima's youngest child, Louis Prima Jr., is taking his excellent tribute band into New York's Feinstein's at the Regency this week.

"Louis Prima in Person" could be a documentary in itself, since it covers virtually the trumpeter's entire career, from his New Orleans Gang, which helped make New York's 52nd Street the main drag for jazz in the early swing era, to the Witnesses, which co-starred singer Keely Smith (the leader's fourth wife) and tenor saxophonist Sam Butera, and helped make Las Vegas into a national destination for the first time.

There's a glorious excerpt of the Prima-Smith-Butera combination at its apogee on the "Ed Sullivan Show" in 1959. In the middle of "Gigolo-Nobody" (done with considerably more musicality than Mr. Roth), the band's key soloists knock into each other like the Three Stooges. Yet compared to Prima's antics (his dance moves anticipate the Pogo), not only the delightfully deadpan Ms. Smith but everybody else on stage seems like they're standing still. Butera is funny, Ms. Smith is funny, rubber-faced trombonist Lou Sino is funny, yet when Prima is on stage, the best anyone else can be is a straight man.

The "Rarities & Hits" collection is a valuable anthology of the entertainer in his final decade, when he generally recorded for his own Prima1 label. It includes five tracks that haven't been reissued before, among them a thoroughly Prima-fied version of the 1968 pop hit "Little Green Apples" (with his own special lyrics). Both the DVD and the CD also feature Prima's final musical and marital partner, the underappreciated singer Gia Maione. Where Ms. Smith's stone-face persona accentuated Prima's zaniness, Ms. Maione's wide-eyed, sweet-voiced innocence made Prima seem even more like a lecherous old satyr, a faun still loaded with vitality and vitriol well into his afternoon.

If Louis Armstrong remains the central figure in all of jazz, and Louis Jordan is the first man of R&B (and, indirectly, rock), Louis Prima's legacy isn't as easy to describe, yet it is everywhere. Generations of Italian-American and other rock and pop stars have cited Prima as an inspiration, including Dion DiMucci, who said "Prima would have been the first guy inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame if he didn't sing in Italian." Sinatra modeled the Rat Pack on Prima's act, and Elvis Presley said that he "learned some of his best moves" from him. Sonny and Cher took the Louis and Keely act and draped it in hippie drag. There are so many influences running in and out of Prima's canon that it's harder than ever to fully fathom all the things he was.

Mr. Friedwald writes about jazz for the Journal. 

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