NEW ORLEANS (AP) - The last day of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival kicked off Sunday under grey skies again, a day after a deluge whipped through the area and rained out closing acts.
Organizers honored tickets on Sunday for those who were rained out Saturday. Stevie Wonder, who was supposed to close the Acura Stage Saturday, gave an impromptu performance in a New Orleans nightclub instead on Saturday evening.
Some of the acts Sunday will be singer Lena Prima; jazz patriarch Ellis Marsalis; the Isley Brothers; gospel singer Mavis Staples; and Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue.
Prima has an interview on one of the festival's 12 stages and a performance 2 ½ hours later on another, with the Lena Prima Band. In an interview ahead of the festival, she said she most likely won't be in the audience at other performances ahead of her own.
"I like to conserve my energy so I can do the best show I can."
Earlier days featured the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Steely Dan, Pearl Jam, Boz Scaggs, R&B crooner Maxwell and Van Morrison.
Prima's show includes both songs she's written (mostly with her husband, bassist Tim Fahey, or with singer-songwriter Ingrid Lucia) and songs written or made popular by her father, whose many hits included "Sing, Sing, Sing," ''Jump, Jive an' Wail," and "A Sunday Kind of Love."
Her own songs embrace many genres, including reggae, country, rock, and New Orleans sound, sometimes with a gospel vibe.
Her father's music is also hard to classify, she said.
Louis Prima, who voiced the orangutan King Louie for the 1967 Disney animation of "The Jungle Book," moved from New Orleans jazz to swing, big band, a Las Vegas lounge act, and a pop-rock band.
Prima said she's always loved her father's music. She also loved his stories about growing up in New Orleans, which included running after Louis Armstrong's band as it drove around town on a flatbed truck, playing to publicize appearances.
She grew up mostly in Las Vegas, with intermittent stints in New Orleans and in suburban Covington, where he owned a golf course.
"I was star-struck by him my whole childhood - how he talked to people, how he treated people, how he was on stage," she said.
Surgery to remove a non-cancerous but large brain tumor left her father in a coma in 1975. She was 7. He died three years later, still in a coma.
At 18, Lena Prima was fronting a heavy metal band. Working two or three day jobs and singing at clubs at night was exhausting, and heavy metal gave way to grunge. Prima's best high school friend was singing in Las Vegas casinos with cover bands and suggested she try it.
It was a hard decision, she said, but she eventually took her friend's advice and enjoyed full-time singing: "Three, four, five sets a night. It was hard but great."
After 10 years, she put her own show together. She'd been featuring a few of her father's songs, and found fans coming up afterward to talk about him. In 2000, the tribute became the show.
Prima played the 2010 Jazz Fest and was entranced by the city's passion for music and musicians' support for each other.
"People go to New Orleans for music. They don't do that in Vegas anymore," she said.
She and Fahey moved around Christmas 2011. During the move, they got a call from the Monteleone hotel, which was opening a lounge and asked if she'd like to open it in January. They have a standing Friday date.
"From the moment I went up there and sang that first song with that band, I felt ... 'Ahhhh.' I felt great," she said.