Louis Prima Jr. knows all about having to live up to a famous father’s legacy.
“I could open the gates for the Second Coming, and people would go, ‘Yeah, but He’s not His father,’ ” he jokes.
The son of the late Louis Prima, the New Orleans bandleader who combined swing, scat singing, and Italian folk music with show-biz pizzazz, Prima Jr. has spent most of his 57 years working out from under his father’s shadow. Though he learned to play drums at age 5 and played trumpet — the old man’s instrument — in his Las Vegas high school band, he went off to college fully expecting to build a career in business.
“It wasn’t a rebellious thing,” says Prima, speaking on a Zoom call ahead of his headlining appearance with his band, the Witnesses, on Monday at City Winery. Rather, he was discouraged from a career in music by the 14-year battle over his father’s will. Prima was 13 years old when his father died in 1978. His mother, Gia Maione, was Louis Prima’s fifth wife; there were six children in all.
Growing up, he didn’t feel especially drawn to music, despite the fact that his mother was also a singer. She’d replaced Keely Smith, Louis Prima’s fourth wife and his best-known female foil. It was Gia who taught her son to play drums.
“I wish God had given me more of her talent,” Prima says. “I tried every instrument in the book, but I was never great at any of them. I thought, if I’m gonna play something, I want to be the Eddie Van Halen of that something. Because if you’re not that, why are you doing it?”
But while launching what would prove to be a lucrative career in the hospitality industry, he began to sit in as a singer with some of his friends’ bands.
“With a microphone in my hand, I went, ‘Oh my God, I know how to do this,’ ” he recalls. “I sing in tune. By no means am I Pavarotti or Seal, but boy, do I know how to do this.”
Yet he still wasn’t inclined to play any of the styles his father encompassed — what he calls “New Orleans bebop swing,” or simply “Prima music.” Instead, at the height of the grunge era, he formed a hard rock band. He called it Problem Child.
There was just one real problem. It wasn’t in Prima’s makeup to play the dour music that was fashionable at the time.
“I always leaned very heavy on entertainment,” says Prima, who has just slogged through rain-drenched New Orleans streets on his motorcycle ahead this interview. Though he wore the ripped jeans and had long hair, he resisted when well-meaning advisers suggested he try singing more like Eddie Vedder.
“I’m not that angry,” he responded. “I’m not that sad.
“Rock ‘n’ roll to me is happiness, loud, boisterous, and fun. Mozart was rock ‘n’ roll. And Louis Prima was rock ‘n’ roll.”
Eventually, Prima came around to the fact that his genes are industrial-strength.
“There are times I’ll be watching video of him and I’ll go, ‘Oh my God, I did that last night onstage!’ ”
He’d been encouraged by the success of bands such as the Royal Crown Revue, the Brian Setzer Orchestra, and other cornerstones of the swing revival scene of the ‘90s. Louis Prima’s music was enjoying a resurgence at the time.
One of the elder Prima’s signature songs, “Jump, Jive, An’ Wail,” appeared in a Gap ad. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy covered “I Wan’na Be Like You,” the song he’d made famous when he voiced the orangutan King Louie in Disney’s animated 1967 version of “The Jungle Book.” And his music — “Oh Marie,” “Buona Sera” — peppered the soundtrack of the Stanley Tucci film “Big Night” (1996), the plot of which hinged on an impending visit by the famed singer to a struggling restaurant.
The younger Prima has had many encounters with fellow musicians who want to bond over his father’s music, he says. Snoop Dogg, for one. Another night, he drank tequila and sang karaoke with the members of Los Lobos, who have covered more than one Louis Prima song.
In the early 2000s, Prima assembled the first version of his current band and named them after Sam Butera and the Witnesses, his father’s longtime backing band. Raising two sons, he didn’t quit the business world for good until 2010, the same year he performed at the commemoration of his father’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Like his father’s music, the songs on Prima’s two albums to date — “Return of the Wildest” (2012) and “Blow” (2014) — hotfoot their way through a promiscuous variety of styles, from blues vamps to jump blues and even Yiddish theater (a cover of “Bei Mir Bist Du Schon,” the smash 1938 hit by the Andrews Sisters).
While the band included several covers of Louis Prima’s songs on the first album, there were none on the second. Instead, “That’s My Home” features the elder Prima himself in a duet with his son, courtesy of some recording studio magic.
A third album has been in the works for several years, Prima says, hung up at first by lineup changes and then the COVID shutdown. When it finally arrives, it will include another posthumous duet with his father.
Because his father was unabashedly an entertainer, Prima believes he doesn’t get the recognition he deserves.
“In jazz, you can’t be a clown,” Prima says. “He should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but it’s never gonna happen.” With the star on the Walk of Fame, “at least one time in my life I got my father his due.”
“That was for you,” he remembers thinking. “Now I’m moving on.”
LOUIS PRIMA JR. AND THE WITNESSES
At City Winery Boston, 80 Beverly St. April 24 at 7:30 p.m (doors 5:30 p.m.). $20-$30. 617-933-8047, www.citywinery.com
E-mail James Sullivan at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @sullivanjames.