From the Broadway stage and the sitcom screen to the helm of his polished big band, Harry Connick Jr. is a leading man in the most classic sense. A throwback to the days when a performer was a true Renaissance man, he’s an all-singing, all-dancing whirlwind of honest talent who somehow makes it all look easy.
The past year has been busy for Connick; he’s starred in a triumphant Broadway revival of The Pajama Game, reprised his role on the Emmy Award-winning Will & Grace, and began shooting a new feature film opposite Hilary Swank. But, with all this, his heart has never been far from his hometown of New Orleans.
Last month, Connick released a pair of new albums, both love songs to the Crescent City, each displaying different aspects of the city’s rich, varied sound. (Both were actually in the can before Katrina hit, but a portion of royalties from album sales will go toward the New Orleans Habitat Musicians’ Village, an affordable housing initiative for musicians, which Connick conceived with Branford Marsalis last year.)
Chanson Du Vieux Carre is an intricate masterwork of big-band jazz that showcases Connick’s talent as a bandleader and arranger, from re-workings of classic Louis Armstrong tunes to complex, textured originals like his own “Ash Wednesday.” And if this album is a thoughtful meditation on the many moods of the city, the second, Oh My Nola, is a head-first leap into the visceral joy of New Orleans music, dipping into indigenous Crescent City sounds from hot traditional jazz to sexy, sloppy, ’60s-style R&B.
STOP, REMEMBER
“It wasn’t an album about Katrina,” Connick stresses. “It was an album about my experiences in New Orleans, and Katrina was one of them.” In the days immediately after the storm, Connick was a familiar face on the news, back in the city to see what he could do. His experience at the New Orleans Convention Center, where hundreds of people were stranded for days without food, water or medicine, begat the chilling gospel-funk original “All These People,” which leaps out of the record like a wrenching sob.
“I saw people dying, I saw dead people, people having seizures because of lack of medication, people who were there for days,” he remembers. “It was demeaning. It was gross. And when I sing it, I’m reminded of what I saw. It’s not our fault, but new headlines and new disasters come up and we move on. But this was such a huge disaster, and it shouldn’t be forgotten.”
A LINK IN THE CHAIN
Connick has never been shy about giving a nod to his roots. Most of his records have at least one song associated with New Orleans on them. Oh My Nola seems especially loving, though, as he pays homage to musical greats like late gospel star Raymond Myles (“Elijah Rock”) or piano wizard James Booker—Connick’s stripped-down arrangement of Booker’s “Let Them Talk” sounds juke-joint authentic. “Just about all of those songs are songs that stay in your consciousness, or your subconscious,” he says. “The composing of Allen Toussaint, the piano of Fess [Professor Longhair] or James Booker. They bring back memories, man.”
More than anything, Harry Connick Jr. is an artist whose appeal transcends trends. His style is timeless, like New Orleans, and his music—although he’s taken it far beyond the city’s borders—is rooted in the tradition that puts a love of the sound before anything else. On Oh My Nola, old and new come together, with legendary bassist Bill Huntington and trombonist Lucien Barbarin joining up-and-coming, under-21 players like Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews and pianist Jonathan Batiste, who, in true laidback New Orleans style, were invited to record when Connick ran into them in town.
Connick shrugs off his place in the history of New Orleans jazz. “I’ve learned a lot from that tradition, but I don’t really think of myself as part of it. I’m humbled by those who came before me, but I don’t feel like it’s appropriate to put myself as part of it.” But it’s records like Oh My Nola, and serendipitous groupings like the musicians on it, that make that tradition and that community what they are. It’s history, and like it or not, Harry Connick Jr.—a class act all the way—is part of it.
FUNKY TOWN: Habitat from calamity
When Katrina’s floodwaters dispersed and hopeful New Orleanians began to trickle home last year, rebuilding the physical structure of their city was the first but not the only task at hand. Torn roofs, soaked possessions and flooded homes weren’t the storm’s only legacy. With whole neighborhoods now utterly unlivable, New Orleans’ vibrant, centuries-old musical culture was also in serious jeopardy. Jazz patriarch Ellis Marsalis famously said once that New Orleans music “bubbles up from the streets.” But now those streets were gone.
Harry Connick Jr. has been a longtime supporter of Habitat for Humanity, whose program is designed to walk low-income homebuyers—who would ordinarily be turned down for home loans—through the process. In lieu of hefty down payments, Habitat clients put in “sweat equity,” helping to construct Habitat homes, as well as taking budgeting classes. In December, Connick, and Branford and Ellis Marsalis, announced their plan for Habitat to build the New Orleans Musicians’ Village—80 homes on eight acres of blighted land in New Orleans’ Upper Ninth Ward.
The centerpiece of the tract would be a community center with classrooms and performance space, and musicians who moved in could earn their sweat equity teaching and performing in the community as well as putting up Sheetrock and hammering nails. Habitat has also bent some of its policies for the Musicians’ Village, including rental units for the first time for older musicians uninterested in the 30-year mortgage, and finding creative ways to verify musicians’ spotty incomes, like checking to see their name listed in the local paper for a weekly gig. So far, according to Harry, 165 families have been accepted, including radio DJs, Mardi Gras Indians and brass-band players, and Habitat has plans to build at least another 200 homes in the neighborhood.
“We were concerned that the musicians who have given the city so much and continue to give so much have no place to live,” Connick explains. “So we decided to try to start a community.”