Harry Connick Jr. had already released four albums by the time
that most of the world was introduced to him in 1989. It was in
the summer of that year that his cool jazz was featured on the
soundtrack of When Harry Met Sally, the romantic comedy
starring Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan that was the year’s most
popular date movie. Performing such standards as George and Ira
Gershwin’s “Our Love Is Here To Stay,“ alongside classic
recordings by Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong, he sounded
comfortably at home on the same stage as those musical giants.
Unlike those legends, however, Connick was not a ghost from the
past, and unlike Linda Ronstadt, who had scored a hit a few
years earlier with an album of lush romantic ballads arranged by
the legendary Nelson Riddle, he was not moonlighting in a
musical genre that was not his own. Harry Connick Jr. was the
real thing, a contemporary artist performing the kind of music
that had never gone away, but had been pushed to the commercial
sidelines for three decades by the musical revolution led by
Elvis, and, later, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling
Stones.
Since
then, Harry Connick Jr. has always been with us, a jazz artist
who has managed to achieve the kind of mainstream success
usually reserved for rockers, rappers, and country singers.
He was
born Joseph Harry Fowler Connick Jr., on September 11, 1967 in
New Orleans, Louisiana. His father was a district attorney and
his mother a judge who would eventually become a Louisiana
Supreme Court Justice. But music was very much a part of the
Connick household. His parents had once owned a record store,
the income from which helped put them through law school, and
his father liked to sing. By the time he was three, he had
learned to play the keyboards. At age six, he performed in
public for the first time, and at nine, he performed Beethoven’s
“Piano Concerto No. 3 Opus 37" with the New Orleans Symphony
Orchestra.
Connick
attended the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts while also a
student at Isidor Newman, a Jesuit high school. A practicing
Catholic, he didn’t always think that religion and show business
were compatible.
“When I
was young I felt more tension between my faith and entertaining
than I do now,” he told Christianity Today. “I realize
now that’s silly. Part of the reason God put me here is to be an
entertainer.”
Growing up
in the musically rich environment of New Orleans where his
teachers included the rhythm and blues pianist James Booker, and
pianist Ellis Marsalis, helped to shape his developing tastes.
“There’s
so much jazz in New Orleans that’s accessible,” he told writer
Andrew Ford in 2005. “I mean you can be a kid and go and listen
to music. You don’t have to be 18 to get into a bar. You can go
in if music is the first purpose of the establishment. You can
go in and listen to music at any age, and it’s fantastic. And
I’m sure that’s what led me to being a jazz musician.”
Connick
may have loved jazz, but he didn’t completely shun the music
that was popular among others in his age group.
“Growing
up in school I loved the rock-and-roll of Billy Joel, Queen and
Led Zeppelin,” he reminisced to The New York Times in
1988. “I danced to the Bee Gees’ music from Saturday Night
Fever, and Stevie Wonder was my hero. But although that
music is very dear to me, and I am nostalgic for it, most of it
I don’t respect as music.”
Later, he
made his way to New York where he studied at Hunter College and
the Manhattan School of Music. It was at the latter institution
that he came to the attention of a Columbia Records executive
who offered him a contract.
His first
album for the label, released in 1987, was titled Harry
Connick Jr., and featured mainly instrumental versions of
standards. His second Columbia release, 20, gave him a
chance to sing. Neither album sold well at first, but Connick
was attracting notice through frequent live performances at
venues in the New York area.
Following
a Connick show at the Blue Note in March 1988, Stephen Holden of
The New York Times wrote that Connick’s “light, downward
trickling runs often evoke Art Tatum, while his rolling
righthanded melodic style suggests a less ornate Erroll Garner.”
In other ways, Connick’s style brought to mind such masters as
Thelonious Monk and Fats Waller, but, Holden noted, though “Mr.
Connick is a traditionalist who wears his influences on his
sleeve, he puts them together in a way that usually avoids mere
imitation.” The critic also observed that Connick was more than
a talented musician. He was a natural entertainer whose
charismatic personality suggested he could successfully branch
out into other non-musical areas of show business.
It was his
music that brought about his entry into the movies, however.
Director Rob Reiner asked him to contribute his talents to the
score of When Harry Met Sally. Aside from the famous
restaurant scene in which Meg Ryan demonstrates how she fakes an
orgasm, it’s the film’s music that lingers in the mind more than
the performances or the dialogue. While most films containing a
song score aspired to top forty success by collecting rock and
roll and pop tunes, When Harry Met Sally defied the trend
by featuring the classy jazz sounds of Ella Fitzgerald, Sinatra,
and Louis Armstrong, as well as the music of the young and still
unknown Connick, Jr. The soundtrack would be a top forty success
regardless, achieving double platinum status, winning Connick
his first Grammy for Best Jazz Male Vocal Performance, and
launching him to stardom.
Respecting
his versatility, Columbia let him chart his own course, giving
him the freedom to explore his musical palette rather than
pressure him to duplicate past successes. So he was able to
follow an album of standards with a set of his own original
compositions, record a series of instrumental releases, issue a
disc of holiday and children’s songs, and even a set of
recordings he made at age 11. He wrote, arranged, and
orchestrated the selections on his third album, 1991's Blue
Light, Red Light, explaining that “I wanted to do a record
in which I was involved as more than just a singer and a piano
player, and so I decided to write all my own material and to
arrange every song.”
With
success came the need to deal with the media, and Connick soon
earned a reputation for being brash and outspoken. In
interviews, he characterized modern pop songs as “kiddie music”
and MTV as “pornography.” Success also breeds resentment, and
the press seemed intent on knocking the new star off his
pedestal with a series of devastating reviews, usually labeling
him a pale imitation of Sinatra whom they accused him of
copying.
He didn’t
deny his admiration for Sinatra whom he called “the greatest
male singer of American popular song,” but he didn’t dwell on
the knocks from critics either.
”I get
terrible reviews everywhere I go,” he told The New York Times
in 1991. “I don’t read most of them, but I hear they are
pretty stinkeroo, which is cool, because I’m not doing it for
the critics. I’m doing it for myself and for the people who come
to see me.”
At the
time he made that statement, he had four albums in the
Billboard top 200. In addition to seeing him in concert,
people could now come to see him in the movies. The New York
Times’ prediction that he would find success in areas other
than music had been proven correct in 1990 when he was cast as
the member of an American bomber crew in Memphis Belle, a
sort of homage to the flag waving war movies of the 1940s. The
next year he taught a child prodigy how to shoot pool in Jodie
Foster’s directorial debut, Little Man Tate. In 1992, did
a guest shot on the popular sitcom, Cheers.
He was
being very selective about the scripts he accepted, however, and
found most of them offensive and at odds with his Catholic
faith. “They have all that stuff in it - bad language, sexual
scenes and nudity,” he told The New York Times. “I’m not
interested in that. It’s got no class.”
The
character he played in 1995's Copycat couldn’t be said to
have class, but it provided Connick with his most challenging
screen role. As a serial killer stalking a psychiatrist, he had
an effectively shocking scene in which he almost murders the
film’s star, Sigourney Weaver, in a public bathroom. Janet
Maslin of The New York Times was impressed, calling him
“scarily effective as a homicidal geek.”
“I still
don’t know why they called me to play that guy,” he said. “But
maybe that’s something for my therapist and I to figure out.”
In 1996,
he appeared as Captain Jimmy Walker, a jet fighter pilot, in a
brief but colorful role in that year’s summer blockbuster, the
alien invasion flick, Independence Day.
Other
films followed through the years. He provided one of the voices
in the animated The Iron Giant, narrated the nostalgic
My Dog Skip, took on romantic parts in Hope Floats
with Sandra Bullock, P.S. I Love You and New In Town
with Renee Zellweger, and appeared in 23 episodes of the long
running Will and Grace TV series, playing Grace’s
husband.
There were
no Blue
Hawaiis
in his
future, though. Music remained his priority.
In 1990,
he released two albums, both of which earned platinum status for
sales of more than one million: Lofty’s Roach Souffle,
featured a jazz trio performing instrumental compositions, while
We Are in Love was a big band album that brought Connick his
second Grammy for Best Jazz Male Vocal Performance. In 1993, he
released his biggest selling album to date, When My Heart
Finds Christmas, which has become a yuletide favorite.
He turned
to funk on his 1995 album, She. Taking the songs on the
road with his Funk Band, he played New York’s Beacon Theater
where critic Jon Pareles opined that singing rhythm and blues
was “not his best format.” It was in his funk incarnation that
Connick performed in the People’s Republic of China at the
Shanghai Center Theater, a concert that was televised live. He
followed this with a second funk album, Star Turtle,
before returning to jazz with 1997's To See You.
Songs I
Heard,
one of two albums he released in 2001, found Connick performing
children’s songs, including “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”
from Mary Poppins. “I remember growing up in New Orleans
and I would hear music like this, and it would make me happy,”
he told CNN. “It was just happy music.”
In 2005,
he was the composer, narrator, and executive producer on The
Happy Elf, a holiday special based on a song he wrote for
2003's Harry for the Holidays, his second Christmas
album.
2005 was
also the year that Hurricane Katrina wrecked havoc on the South,
and Connick, accompanied by fellow New Orleans musician Branford
Marsalis, visited the city’s evacuees at the Astrodome. “We
wanted to do something to help our city, but didn’t know what,
given that we’re musicians who don’t know much about politics or
social planning. We just knew something needed to be done.”
One of the
things that Connick thought needed to be done that he could do
was organize a telethon, A Concert for Hurricane Relief
that he co-hosted with NBC’s Matt Lauer and featured such
performers as Mike Myers, Kanye West, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill.
He was also named an honorary chair of Habitat for Humanity’s
Operation Home Delivery, and with Marsalis, announced the
formation of the Musician’s Village to help house musicians who
had been left homeless following the disaster.
And the
music continues, with Connick refusing to limit himself to the
expectations of others. In 2006, he starred in a Broadway
revival of The Pajama Game for which he received a Tony
nomination. Despite having proclaimed that “I don’t respect
people who are considered great because of their vocal
acrobatics,” in 2010 he agreed to appear on American Idol,
the talent show in which vocal acrobatics are often mistaken for
genuine singing ability, as a mentor to the top five
contestants. He also performed the Lennon/McCartney ballad “And
I Love Her” from his current album, Harry Connick Jr: Your
Songs. The disc was a departure of sorts in that Connick
also covered Elvis Presley’s hit, “Can’t Help Falling in Love,”
and the Carpenters’ “Close to You.” It was producer Clive Davis
who encouraged him to record such pop standards.
“I’m going
to die without ever having changed jazz music,” he once said.
Maybe so, but Harry Connick Jr.’s contribution to this great
American musical form has been immense, and he’s kept it alive
and flourishing at a time when too much of the music blasting
out of radios and MP3 players seems less likely to soothe the
savage beast than to serve as one of his weapons.
--by
Brian
W. Fairbanks