Posted on 06/05/2009 2:11:15 PM PDT by scott says
Sam Butera, a hard-swinging tenor saxophonist who formed a rowdy and successful onstage partnership with entertainers Louis Prima and Keely Smith in the 1950s, died Wednesday at a hospital in Las Vegas. He was 81.
He had Alzheimer's disease, according to a report in the Las Vegas Sun.
Prima, nearly 20 years older than Butera, was a composer ("Sing, Sing, Sing"), trumpeter, singer and irrepressible stage performer, a combination of Louis Armstrong and Jerry Lewis. His career was on the wane when he teamed in 1954 with Butera, who a few years earlier had been named the country's outstanding teenage jazz musician by Look magazine. Both men were New Orleans natives of Italian heritage.
Butera was enjoying a long engagement at a New Orleans club owned by Prima's brother before he and Louis Prima began a musical union in 1954 that lasted nearly two decades. They recorded hit albums for Capitol Records, became nightclub fixtures from Las Vegas to New York and appeared in movies and on television.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
I always thought Sonny Bono copped their act. The only difference was that Prima and Smith had talent.
Goes by fast doesn't it?
I saw one of the shows at the Masonic, and only then found out about the shows at Bimbo's you were lucky to get the tickets.
Last of the great rock’n’roll sax players!
“He was the Gato Barbieri of his day.”
They weren’t all that many years apart in age. Barbieri is 74, Butera just passed at 81.
I'm sure he passed it on.
How did he sound in '04 at, what 75 years young?
RIP.
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