Harry Connick Jr. came on in the youth-crazed, tradition-bound jazz renaissance of the ’80s created by Wynton Marsalis. Like Wynton, Connick was from New Orleans, though from the other side of the tracks: he was white and his father was a jazz-singing district attorney. But like Marsalis, Connick was raised in the racially mixed New Orleans music community, with the same reverence for tradition. An album released by Columbia in 1992 called 11 shows him already playing authoritative New Orleans piano at that early age (Connick’s album titles often correspond to his age when they were recorded — he was born in 1967). Although for some he was still both too white and too handsome to be taken seriously, his skill was otherwise undeniable — Lofty’s Roach Soufflé (1990) shows him in a trio session playing a program of originals in a style that, as commentators pointed out, drew equally from the likes of Erroll Garner, Earl Hines, and Thelonious Monk.

But it was really the soundtrack When Harry Met Sally (1989 — all his albums are on Columbia) that made Connick a crossover star. That’s when his voice came to the forefront — a romantic light baritone that was nearly a ringer for early Sinatra. I say nearly, because though he matched Sinatra in vocal timbre, and even in his choice of material and approach, he was no match for Sinatra in phrasing and attack, in what used to be called "selling" a song. No matter. Connick was a star. In 1990 he was up against Tony Bennett for a "Best Jazz Vocal (Male)" Grammy. On the telecast, as I remember it, Connick sang a song. Tony sang a song. Harry won.

In a sold-out performance at Symphony Hall last month, and on two new albums, Songs I Heard and 30, it’s not difficult to see — and hear — why Connick is so popular. At Symphony Hall he fronted one of his expertly hand-picked big bands. The line-up included the New Orleans trumpeter Leroy Jones, and it was driven by a fine drummer, Arthur Latin, whom Connick said he’d discovered in Austin.

Connick looked terrific. He’s not only a singing star now but also a movie star: he was featured in Independence Day, he starred opposite Sandra Bullock in Hope Floats and in the ABC production of South Pacific, and he’ll star with Sarah Jessica Parker in the upcoming comedy Life Without Dick. And he’s the composer and lyricist of a Broadway musical, Thou Shalt Not. His band sat behind imposing rounded silver music stands that were like Le Corbusier battlements. Connick strode the stage dressed in black pants and untucked open-collar black shirt, eliciting female shrieks from the audience, flirting, verbally riffing with everyone and everything. And he opened with "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious."

That’s one thing about Harry — say what you will, he’s got his own idiosyncratic integrity. His audience was almost all young adults in their 20s and 30s, and he had no compunction about opening with a kid’s song from Mary Poppins. In fact, Songs I Heard comprises all tunes from his favorite childhood movies in his own big-band arrangements — Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Sound of Music, The Wizard of Oz, Annie. On 30, a mostly solo piano-and-vocal album, he plays instrumental versions of Nino Rota’s "Love Theme from The Godfather" ("Speak Softly Love") and Tony Orlando and Dawn’s 1973 hit cheese soufflé "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree."

These aren’t jazz "deconstructions," like something off a Hal Willner album. Connick is reclaiming them for straight-ahead jazz. Fine by me. Miles Davis made the Eddie Cantor number "Bye Bye Blackbird" into a jazz standard, and Sonny Rollins is still drawing inspiration from songs he heard in Hollywood movies before he was 10. (Geoff Burke’s liner notes to Songs I Heard make Connick’s daring to "discover the child within" very profound indeed.) At Symphony Hall, he delivered "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" over New Orleans second-line parade rhythms replete with a fine Leroy Jones trumpet solo and call-and-response vocals ("dum-diddle-ay") with the band.

Connick’s writing for the band and his own piano playing were irreproachable. The shifts from New Orleans shuffle and polyphony to a sleek and gleaming post-Basie swing were seamless, and the narratives were full of attractive details — a baritone-sax fill at the end of a phrase on "That Old Black Magic," the muted brass nyah-nyahs on "Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead," the slow, dirge-like parade snare drum on "Cry Me a River." On Songs I Heard, the big-band jazz is sometimes augmented with strings, and "Pure Imagination" (from Willy Wonka) is rich with inner voicings of Bacharach-style low brass.

As for his piano playing, Connick’s influences are not only Monk (displaced accents, percussive dissonances, and wide-angle harmonies), Garner (organic melody making), and Hines (advanced stride) but also the rough-hewn calypso-style New Orleans boogie-woogie of Professor Longhair, Toots Washington, and James Booker. (Connick studied with both Booker and Ellis Marsalis.) A lot of contemporary New Orleans–style pianists follow Longhair and Booker by overplaying, thundering on the keyboard with as many notes and as much rockin’ rhythm as possible. At Symphony Hall, "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" began as a piano fantasy full of beautiful, rich chording, and he played another solo piano piece in the Longhair/Booker style that held a steady, understated boogie-woogie rhythm in the left hand while spinning clear, lithe melodies in the right. Connick’s sense of piano voicings makes him one of the few modern jazz pianists with a distinctive touch. And, hey, he didn’t sing "Tie a Yellow Ribbon."

The singing is where he gets in trouble, and yet it’s his big selling point. Without his Big Band Frank persona, he wouldn’t be the star that he is. Perhaps it’s unfair to put Connick on a level with Sinatra, but that’s the standard he’s set for himself. Singers can get by in all kinds of ways — jazz singers with their phrasing and cool, blues singers with their distinctive grit and their mastery of melismas and bent notes, rockers with their rhythm and cries of desperation and ecstasy. When Sinatra released his late, abysmal Duets albums, Robert Christgau assessed Frank’s failing chops and said, pitilessly, "He who lives by the larynx dies by the larynx." That is, sensitivity and phrasing aside, Sinatra depended most of all on those mighty pipes. Connick has a touch of the Sinatra sound and manner, and he sings similarly jazz-inflected pop. In fact, the ballads on Songs I Heard are so dead-on in their weepy charm ("Pure Imagination" and "Stay Awake" among them) that another title for the album could have been Songs Sinatra Should Have Sung.

But he who lives by Frank dies by Frank. From the opening "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" of the Symphony Hall concert, Connick seemed unsure. His voice lacks Sinatra’s legendary breath support, so it’s always a bit unsteady. But on a very basic level, he never flat out goes for it — the climax, the big moment. In a recent interview, Tony Bennett pointed out that whenever he comes to the word "love" in a lyric, he pays special attention to it. That may sound like a commonplace, even corny. But at Symphony Hall, it was easy to hear what Bennett was talking about — Connick seemed to give all words the same weight, and at times I wondered whether he knew what he was singing about. Even Big Bad Voodoo Daddy’s neo-swing "I Wanna Be like You" (from Disney’s Jungle Book) has more unbuttoned vocal bravura than anything in Connick’s book.

Sinatra and Bennett phrase their vocal lines like instrumentalists, with total command of the word-music combination; Connick leaves his words stranded. Sinatra’s genius was to create the illusion of pure musicmaking as purely conversational, but to do it he had to phrase melody in a clean, unbroken legato line, and one of his tricks was to wrap the end of one verse around the beginning of the next without seeming to take a breath. That’s what accounts for some of his most beautiful, dramatic, and "emotional" performances. Connick can sustain a line over the opening two notes of "Over the Rainbow," but he can’t get much farther than that. When he sang the descending lines "round and round and round I go" in "That Old Black Magic," he really did sound rhythmically lost. If you’re a rocker who’s wondered what makes Sinatra great, a comparison between Frank and Harry would be instructive.

There are other sins in Connick’s singing. When he tries to sing blue — by bending a note or stretching a syllable melismatically — the results are disastrous. He opens the New Orleans classic "Junco Partner" playing the melody over a daringly slow two-chord vamp — it’s as stately as Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata — but his vocals massacre it. When he sings, "They got boys locked up in Angola," his attempt to break "boys" into two notes that flat into blue is so mechanical and, well, white that it’s hard not to think, "Yeah, Harry, and your dad probably put ’em there." It’s the kind of thing a Dr. John does so matter-of-factly it’s almost a mannerism.

But don’t take my word for it. Compare the latest Connick with the latest Bennett. On Playin’ with My Friends: Bennett Sings the Blues (Columbia), Tony’s messing in an area where you could argue he has no business. But here he is singing "Let the Good Times Roll" with B.B. King, "Evenin’ " with Ray Charles, and "Everyday I Have the Blues" with Stevie Wonder. Maybe you don’t care about Tony, and he’s certainly no blacker than Connick (unless you count the deprivations of an Italian-American growing up in the Depression). But he knows how to phrase, and when he bends a note, when he sings "every DAY," he holds it at the right spot, and when he sings "nobody SEEMS to care," he holds "seems" and lets his vibrato do the work. Phrasing is a game of inches, or millibeats — of beginning and ending a word at the right moment. And somehow Bennett is always there.

If nothing else, Connick is a devoted student of the music. (At Symphony Hall, he spoke of the "honor" of playing his standards for the audience.) And in a weird way, he’s created his own musical world — it’s not nostalgia, exactly. The reason I reach back to Sinatra and Bennett for comparison is that there’s really no one else of Connick’s generation doing anything like this on such a scale (neo-swing has come and gone). He’s able to make "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" sound older than it is — like something from Hoagy Carmichael’s era. But he’s applying the older values of pop and jazz to the world he grew up in — a world of Willy Wonka and Oz and even "Junco Partner." He’s not simply copying older crooners like Bennett and Sinatra; he’s applying their values to contemporary pop and his personal musical experience. To judge by the size of the crowd at Symphony Hall, and the number of albums he sells, it’s Harry’s world, and a lot of people are living in it.

Issue Date: November 29 - December 6, 2001

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