Bass player and filmmaker Joe Lauro tries on the role of film curator for Legends" series at Bay Street"

Though he has been a longtime bass player with the popular band The Lone Sharks, when Joe Lauro went to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival late last month, it was not as a musician but as a movie producer. He presented there his newest film, “Louis Prima: In Person,” a compilation of live performances by the trumpet player and singer, a New Orleans native who would have turned 100 this coming December.

On May 22, Mr. Lauro will be working as both a musician, playing with The Who Dat Loungers, and as a film curator, launching “The Legend Series” at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, where he lives. The series of four nights of films will feature footage of live performances by some of the best musicians of the 20th century.

This Saturday will be a “Legends of Rock” evening with footage of Janis Joplin, the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, Sly & the Family Stone and others. The Who Dat Loungers will offer a live performance as a bonus.

A “Legends of Jazz and Blues” film will be offered on Monday, June 7, featuring performance footage of Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Howling Wolf, and Muddy Waters, among others. The following Monday, June 14, “The Fabulous Divas” will be shown at Bay Street, including Barbra Streisand, Peggy Lee, the Supremes, Aretha Franklin, and Ethel Merman. The finale of the series will be on Monday, June 21, with “The Pioneers of Rock” with Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Ruth Brown, and Louis Prima.

All showings are at 8 p.m. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased at baystreet.org or by calling 725-9500.

Prima has been a favorite of Mr. Lauro for quite some time. In 1999, a documentary he and Don McGlynn made, “Louis Prima: The Wildest!” was an award-winner at the Hamptons International Film Festival and shown repeatedly on PBS stations. Mr. Prima, whose biggest hits include “Just a Gigolo” and “That Old Black Magic” with Keely Smith, was a popular bandleader in the 1930s and ’40s who struggled when big bands fell out of favor. After he hooked up with Ms. Smith, their band, “The Wildest,” was one of the hottest acts in Las Vegas in the 1950s. Mr. Lauro’s recent trip to New Orleans offered a perfect opportunity to reconnect with Mr. Prima’s roots.

In addition to wearing his movie producer hat, Mr. Lauro was in New Orleans to shoot some footage and do preliminary work for his next documentary, this time about another native of the Big Easy: Fats Domino. He spent time with the legendary singer and is now picking and choosing footage of Mr. Domino’s performances stretching back into the 1950s.

“I’m lucky that I can pick and choose my projects, because to do right by a subject you have to become almost like a family member,” Mr. Lauro said. “That means you have to be passionate about the project, and I am about Fats Domino and New Orleans. We did three days of filming with Fats and it was great.”

For most documentary filmmakers, obstacles include finding good, preferably never-before-seen footage and having a budget sufficient to pay for that footage. Here is where Mr. Lauro has a huge advantage. In 1991, he founded a company that is now known as Historic Films, based in Greenport, which owns literally miles of film footage that it leases out to big and small-screen documentary filmmakers and for use in special telecasts. Among the company’s clients have been the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Museum, Martin Scorsese, “American Idol,” and the Grammy Awards.

Business has been so good that Mr. Lauro has had to give up his regular gig in The Lone Sharks. “The band is doing better than ever and has so many bookings that I just couldn’t keep up,” he said. “I’ll sit in when I can, because I still love the music.”

Life is about to get even busier. This fall, Magnolia Pictures is releasing Mr. Lauro’s latest full-length documentary, “Rejoice and Shout,” about the history of African-American gospel music.