Saxophonist Butera Dead at 81
According to The Associated Press, jazz saxophonist and lounge entertainment sidekick Sam Butera died Wednesday morning at the Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas.
Born in New Orleans in 1927, Butera's first encounter with the sax was when he attended a wedding at the ripe age of seven. Hearing a wedding musician play, he passion for the instrument lit up, and from then on he pursued music. Butera's career got an early start, playing with Ray McKinley's orchestra straight out of high school.
Named one of jazz's up and coming performers by Look Magazine at the age of 18, he soon found himself in the orbit of such big band stars as Tommy Dorsey, Joe Reichman, and Paul Gayten. A chance meeting back home brought him in contact with Louis Prima's brother Leon, who ran the 500 club in New Orleans. After four years of playing the club, Butera joined forces with Prima and Prima's wife, Keeley Smith, forging one of his most lasting friendships.
Those friendships would take him to Las Vegas, where he would perform with Prima and Smith as part of The Witnesses. The act continued for 21 years until Prima's death in 1975. But many of the songs they authored, including "I'm Just a Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody" and "Jump Jive N' Wail" would later become hits in their own right, becoming Billboard singles in the hands of such musicians as David Lee Roth and Brian Setzer.
Aside from his work with Prima, Butera also performed alongside Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and the rest of the Rat Pack, recording a single with Sinatra in 1976.
In an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2004, Butera recalled his reasons for going for big band versus bebop.
"I never did go in for bebop because in my mind, people wanted to hear the melody," Butera said. "You gotta let people know the song they can listen to, so they can recall."
That simple formula and the upbeat tempo of his songs may help explain his enduring career. It also gets at the heart of the lounge lizard culture of the '50s to '70s. It was a simple time filled with cheap drinks and cheap entertainment that could be found in any hotel along the Las Vegas Strip, giving fuel to the fire of a booming economy. Butera's music was part of that inferno.
Cheryl Butera, Sam's daughter, seems to agree.
"I think it did make people want to go to the hotels," she said of his playing. "It set the tone of entertainment in Las Vegas."
Butera stopped touring in 2004, claiming that the rigors of being on the road, coupled with his heart condition, made it difficult to play. It was a fortuitous decision, as the old clubs of his boyhood and youth were giving way to expansive high-end hotels with names like Wynn and Excalibur. But as far as Cheryl is concerned, the party was good as long as it lasted.
"My father and Prima were successful because their music was happy," she said as she summed up her father's life. "And people were looking for entertainment."
