During this past summer, I attended my friend’s bachelor party in New Orleans. Prior to visiting the Crescent City, I had made preliminary arrangements to mix some business with pleasure and schedule an interview with Lena Prima, daughter of Louis Prima, the irrepressible, jazz trumpeter, singer and just a gigolo New Orleanian showman from the1930s to the 1970s.

We met at the Hotel Monteleone, an establishment that hosted American literary writers like Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner. The location is also a place where Lena had a singing residency for several years and her father, before her, had performed, in the hotel’s Skylight Room.