In the seven years that Harry Connick Jr. has worked the worldwide stage, we’ve seen him go from one likable shtick to another.
From teen piano prodigy, to deep-voiced big-band crooner, to thoughtful jazzman at the center of his Monk-styled acoustic trio. The singer and composer of new songs that sound like ’40s show tunes. The teller of flip jokes and all that absurdly humble “what – me, a star?” banter on stage. The expert salesman of big movie themes and sentimental Christmas ballads.
The next Sinatra, he has been called at least a thousand times.
And then there is the Connick who, like Sinatra, is also the Hollywood actor.
Yet the dreamy co-star of the films Memphis Belle and Little Man Tate hasn’t even made a movie in three years, while the offers keep pouring in.
“Too busy makin’ music,” Connick says of his reasons for turning scripts away. “Too much sex and violence, anyway. I won’t do any of that.”
He was still in his teens when the music press started swelling around him. Now, at 26, he has indeed stayed “busy making music,” cranking out nine albums in seven years.
The latest is the New Orleans-inspired outing, She, which sends him in yet another direction. Heavy on funk, rock backbeat and Southern blues guitar, this is not the Connick most people know.
Forget the dapper kid playing abstract jazz in a three-piece suit on The Tonight Show. This Harry is showing up for concerts in jeans and black leather. He’s even strapping on his own guitar and having Led Zeppelin tracks fired over the P.A. during intermission.
The reception has been somewhat mixed. Though fans know it’s the same Connick underneath, critics haven’t been as kind, pointing to a lack of comfort in watching the once-smooth operator straining to be something he may not be.
Though Connick is careful to incorporate a little from each of his many phases into his new stage show, this outing, which plays the Miami Arena on Saturday, is still a long way from his other tours.
“There are no elements of jazz in it,” Connick says during an interview with the Sun-Sentinel to discuss his latest compositions. “It’s all just funk and rock ‘n’ roll. The music I grew up playing in addition to jazz.”
Though he says jazz was not part of the plan this time, the new music is not unlike that of jazz-based rock musicians such as Sting and Donald Fagen.
Connick says he has heard those comparisons, but says similarities of style are just coincidence. That’s particularly true of Fagen’s band Steely Dan, he says, which was “always cool, but never an influence.”
He thinks such comparisons are due in part to the manner in which he layered his own vocals on She’s title track, to sound as though he was singing with himself.
“They used to double-track a lot of their vocals,” Connick says of Steely Dan. “But that was just an effect – not a style.”
Connick is calling from a Philadelphia hotel room. He has been on tour all summer, playing to a somewhat mixed box office as well as all those critical barbs.
Yet little of it seems to matter to him. Married just four months ago to former model Jill Goodacre, he’s still on a cloud, calling her “the love of my life.”
If there is one constant about Harry Connick Jr. it’s his rock-solid demeanor, from which he has never wavered publicly – his near-prudish views and his outward determination to remain good and true and kind and clean in the bizarre world that is show business. He insists he will never be tainted by money, fame, drugs or power.
“I can only be what I am,” he has said time and again, including this time.
“I just kinda live my life the way my parents taught me. The way I was brought up has nothing to do with Hollywood.
“I will not be led astray. I’m a serious musician. That kinda occupies my time.”
So when will he stop practicing and loosen up a little?
“When I get good at what I’m doing.”
And what about that handgun found in his suitcase at a New York airport security checkpoint last year (his one public misstep)? Turned out it was a Christmas gift from his sister, Connick says, adding that he really didn’t know guns were not permitted on board.
For now Connick and Goodacre have “settled” in Manhattan, but she is traveling with him, leaving the setting up of a true homefront for some other time. He’ll tour for the next two years.
He says he’s ready to start a family, but has mixed feelings about it since this is also “the time to work.”
“I guess while the kid’s an infant you can bring him around,” Connick says of road life.
“I’d love to have children. Jill would, too. It would really be wonderful.”
He wonders about a home in Connecticut or, better yet, New Orleans, where he grew up and practiced piano under the guidance of the famed Ellis Marsalis, patriarch of the musical family that includes Branford and Wynton.
Connick isn’t sure why there’s so much fuss about his “new style.”
“I’ve been playing this music all my life,” he says. But until now, Connick had been marketed by the giant Sony Corp. as a kind of new-wave nostalgia act – a handsome young singing and composing sensation who was as new as could be, though his sound was rooted deep in music’s glorious swing era.
And there were bonuses: Connick’s jazz background legitimized him with many pop critics, while his self-effacing personality endeared him to fans and media.
With all that, Sony had a golden formula – a new star who could sell records and tickets to several generations, while garnering lots of long-winded press that talked up his versatility.
But there was one hurdle Connick never overcame: radio. As that industry has splintered into dozens of fragmented formats, Connick’s sound never found a home.
Deemed too adult for Top 40, too sleepy for adult contemporary, too mellow for jazz, his pop material was rarely played. Though his jazz tracks did make the air, he found himself consigned to lighter stations such as LOVE 94 (93.9 FM) and mostly outclassed on the hardcore jazz outlets.
None of it was enough to drive the kind of sales Sony expects.
So there was a plan to recast him this time out, with the hope that some radio format somewhere might embrace this lighter, brighter, hipper Harry. Just whose idea this was, Connick won’t say. He maintains the new music (if not the re-imaging) is all his idea.
More importantly, he says, this is only one of dozens of new things he may try in his continual quest to become a polished musician. “I’m having a ball. This business has allowed me to do what I always wanted to do, which is play music for a living. It’s always been up to me how I want to represent myself.”
If he ever finds the time, Connick would like to finish college, (“Impossible with my schedule now,”) and hopes to find a couple of decent movie scripts.
Nothing too racy, of course.
“Like the kind of stuff Jimmy Stewart used to do,” he says. “I have no intention of ever doing a nude scene. I mean it.”
We know.
— Harry Connick Jr. is booked with opening act the Leroy Jones Quintet at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Miami Arena, 721 NW First Ave. Tickets are $25 and $35. Call Ticketmaster, 966-3309 (Palm Beach), 523-3309 (Broward), 358-5885 (Dade).
— Hear the music at 496-5463 in Palm Beach, 523-5463 in Broward, 866-5463 in Dade. Enter Source Line category 7201
