Harry Connick, Jr., Gets the Big Break

is the funky white boy from new orleans going to save jazz, or is jazz going to save him?

On The Principle that nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded, Harry Connick, Jr., the rear-guard jazz pianist and--le mot juste--crooner, has become so celebrated that some people have started to resent him. He is, to be sure, young (23), white, talented and successful--all offensive qualities. He also comes from New Orleans, a city with many musical heroes, most of whom suffered from lack of worldly acclaim. But he can't help where he's from or what he is, and although he may seem to have come a long way in a short time, all he has gained is a chance at life in the music business, which is no assurance of anything. Clearly, Connick knows how to wear a suit and tie a necktie; he has the right heroes--Eubie Blake, Errol Garner, Thelonious Monk, James Booker, Ellis Marsalis; he can sing in tune; and he possesses considerable piano technique. He comes on the scene at a time when the accepted convention is for young middle-class white men to mimic performers who are poor, old and black. It may seem odd that someone devotes himself to a kind of music--stride piano--supposedly dead before he was born, but it is, in fact, a lot less strange for Connick to emulate Hoagy Carmichael than for Eric Clapton to emulate Robert Johnson. It's just that, in the current cultural context, when someone behaves as if Bob Dylan had never existed, people wonder what it means.

One thing it means is that because of Connick, people who might not otherwise will hear songs that employ more than three chords, with lyrics in Standard English, songs by men such as Cole Porter and the Gershwins. It is true that Connick as a singer may not be the equal of Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett, but he plays piano better than either. If he suffers by comparison with Nat Cole, so does everybody else.

The question is not whether Connick can make the world safe for jazz but whether jazz can make the world safe for Connick. Looking at him, it's hard not to recall the lost promise of performers such as Johnny Mathis and Barbra Streisand, who seemed in their early careers to possess the individuality of jazz artists but whose music became less interesting as it became more popular. The time to dislike Connick will be when he sells his talent short. It seems likely that he will have the popular support to do original work if he has it in him. For now, he is, as music writer Chris Albertson called him, "an artist of immense promise."

Anyone wondering what it would be like if H. G. Wells's time machine actually existed had but to buy a ticket last fall to Connick's big-band concert tour. From Connick's opening notes-- "Shoo, fly, don't bother me"--to his final scat-singing solo, he taxed listeners' ears with nothing more modern than mid-Fifties Monk. At times, the Harry Connick, Jr., Orchestra--a dozen horns, plus rhythm section--sounded like Duke Ellington's Washingtonians of the Twenties. Connick performed songs associated with Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat Cole, Fred Astaire--all of whom had done them better, but not lately.

Connick's audiences, contrary to the tradition of the past 20-odd years, are not redolent of marijuana. They dress Republican and consist of older people grateful for a chance to hear their kind of music and young folk who, having never heard or seen anything like it, respond to it as a novelty.

At a Connick concert, the lights go up to reveal the band, all in dark suits, neckties and short haircuts, playing a brief fanfare. Then the clean-cut Connick, in blue blazer (belted back), gray slacks, black loafers and white open-collar shirt, snaps his fingers, exchanges musical jokes with black drummer Shannon Powell, his friend of 16 years, and has a fine time doing such songs as the 66-year-old It Had to Be You, the mainstay tune of his score for When Harry Met Sally..., which has spent more than a year on the charts.

"I had never heard anything as original and inventive," said Rob Reiner, the film's director, of Connick's music.

"The fact that he was only twenty-one was astounding."

Success seems to have brought Connick a rare degree of artistic freedom. Columbia Records spokesman Arthur Levy said, "We don't have much to say about what he does. When an artist sells seven hundred fifty thousand units, thank God, especially a jazz artist, he attains a stature over which the record company has very little influence." So enthusiastic is Columbia about Connick that it has taken to releasing albums by him two at a time, most recently a big-band vocal album and a piano-jazz-trio record that, with the movie sound track, bring his catalog total to five unusually popular collections.

Jazz has suffered so much abuse in the past 50 years the miracle is that it exists at all. Once, listening to Billie Holiday sing with a small Teddy Wilson group of the Thirties, Jim Dickinson, the Memphis record producer and pianist who has recorded with everyone from Sam Phillips to the Rolling Stones to the Replacements, said, "They had music so nice--why'd they have to go and change it?"

Someone once said that New Orleans was not one of the southernmost cities in the United States but one of the northernmost cities of Guatemala. A New Orleans man was shot recently over a plate of macaroni. It is, whatever else, a city, as the travelog cliché goes, of contrasts: political conservatism, music, parades. Connick is the product of a prominent Irish Catholic family, his mother a judge who died when he was 13, his father a music lover who last October was re-elected city D.A., a post he has held for 15 years. Connick's background is the stuff of romance: His parents met in Casablanca, where she was taking the grand tour and he, a journalist, was studying bullfighting. Later, the music-loving Connicks sent themselves to law school with the proceeds from a couple of record stores they owned in New Orleans. There are home movies of nine-year-old Junior playing with 93- year-old Eubie Blake.

From the time he was 13 until he graduated from high school and went to New York City, Connick studied with pianist Ellis Marsalis, father of musical progeny Wynton, Branford and Delfeayo. Branford, seven years Connick's senior, says that "Harry Connick can go in any direction he feels like. That's how good he is. It's not technique. Technique is bullshit. It's half the battle. He's one of those rare people who can hear music and internalize it, whatever it is. Harry has it all. He's genuinely funny, six feet two and handsome as hell. The two things that most of his audience will never know about him is how funny he really is and how great a musician he is. Because the thing that has made him successful doesn't really highlight his musical ability. Pick any style--stride, modern--he can play all of them. I can't say enough about him as a musician. He doesn't know himself how good a musician he is."

Legendary New Orleans pianist Mac Rebennack, alias Dr. John, who recorded a track and a video with Connick, says he "got to hear him play in a couple of settin's, and I was real impressed. I liked that he was takin' stuff his own way--he'd play some real New Orleans stuff, some Monk stuff, some Ellington stuff, and he does 'em good. He tickled me, 'cause on the tune we did together, he snuck in some James Booker stuff with his left hand. I think that's beautiful that he can mix in some stuff from Monk or Booker, different cats that's unrelatable, in a way, but he can draw 'em together.

"I'll tell you something James Booker told me, and that is, you draw offa all the guys you can and you put 'em together and that's how you find yourself. I really believe that's what Harry's doin'. And I think he finds hisself here and there, 'cause every now and then, I hear somethin' come out of him that ain't from them other cats, and maybe it's from some cat I ain't heard, but I got a feelin' that's just Harry's stuff."

Connick, like the members of his band, seems to have grown up in a refined environment where babies are taught to love Lester Young. It does seem odd, though, that except for a few recent compositions--"Here's a song I wrote with my uncle when I was fourteen"--the whole big-band set could have been done by Bobby Darin 25 years ago. No shadow of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane or--God forbid--Jimi Hendrix penetrates this blue-blazered realm. "I like a Zeppelin tune," Connick sang in How About You, and for a moment, one could see the similarity between him and Zeppelinera Jimmy Page, both young players incapable of reaching the depths of the music that fascinated them. It was revelatory of a couple of things, one being the goodness of Connick's heart, that the high point of his concert in Houston was two songs performed by the venerable blues singer Sam McClean, a New Orleansian transplanted to Texas. McClean, a Bobby Bland sound-alike (who better?), received a standing ovation. At the concert's end, Connick and the band got another standing ovation, did one encore with Connick on drums and Powell on piano--this band may have profound historical roots, but it also has a lot of fun--and called it a night.

Backstage, seated at a folding table in T-shirt and jeans, Connick was the (concluded on page 134)Harry Connick, Jr.(continued from page 64) essential Southern gentleman, signing autographs, posing for pictures, standing up without even thinking about it when an older couple approached. The woman gave him a card: "I wrote you a note on the back. If you ever need anything in Houston, anything at all, ever...."

"That's very sweet of you, thanks."

It's as if Connick lives in a realm where bands don't do tape-recorded shows, drummers have Social Security numbers, men wear cuff links, not earrings. Of drug clinics, endless solos, electronic instruments, girl singers in their underwear, as Randy Newman observed:

Maybe they heard about it

And maybe not

Probably they heard about it

And just forgot

At this point, there's no telling what Connick can't do. A piano player with a sly grin and a certain resemblance to Montgomery Clift could go a long way. He has already made his film debut in Memphis Belle. What if he became a movie star--moved to California and ran for governor--then, once he was over 35 and eligible to run for President and people had forgotten Lee Atwater and were a bit more tolerant of people from the South...? In the meantime, Connick is better than anything on MTV.