E-mail a friendHarry Connick, Jr.
airdate November 17, 2009
With his swing and big band sound, Harry Connick, Jr. has had CD sales of more than 25 million, charted in both jazz and pop genres and won multiple Grammys—the first for his work on the film soundtrack of When Harry Met Sally. He's also earned accolades in the TV and theater worlds, including a Tony nod for acting. Connick was a child prodigy, playing piano in the French Quarter of his native New Orleans. He's also known for his work to help the Gulf region recover from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. His newest project is the "Your Songs" CD.
New Orleans native explains how he's working to preserve music in his hometown. (1:42)
Full Interview (23:00)
Harry Connick, Jr.
Tavis: Pleased to welcome Harry Connick, Jr. to this program. The multitalented musician and actor is out with a new collection of covers featuring songs from artists ranging from Frank Sinatra, Elton John, the Beatles, Nat King Cole and many more.
As I mentioned at the top, he was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Musician's Village in his hometown of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Much more on that in a moment.
First, though, from the new project, "Your Songs," here he is performing the Frank Sinatra classic, "All the Way."
[Clip]
Tavis: So you and Sinatra are, like, linked at the hip from the beginning of your career all the way through. Not a bad guy to be linked with, I guess.
Harry Connick, Jr.: Well at first, I remember being in Atlantic City once and there was a cover of the Atlantic City magazine - this is going back when I was probably 21, 22 years old - and the headline was, "The Next Sinatra." And I remember seeing that and saying, "Boy, that's really cool, to be thought of in the same idea as Frank Sinatra."
Then as time went on I started, quite frankly, to get a little bit irritated by it because everywhere I went, people would ask me about Frank and compare me to Frank. He was a huge influence, but so was Louis Armstrong and many other musicians.
Then I entered another phase, I think the phase I'm in now, which will probably last till I die, that it's a great honor to be compared with him or associated with him in any way because he was the best and it's very kind of people to do that.
Tavis: What made you - or what helped you make the turn to going from being irritated by it to reveling in it?
Connick: I think it's growing up. When I'm 25, 30 years old there were things that I didn't want to talk about. I didn't want to talk about my mother's death, I didn't want to talk about my personal life, I didn't want to talk about being compared to Frank Sinatra. It was all about art all the time, and I think as I got older I started to realize that life is about a lot more than that and you kind of mellow out.
The artistic passion didn't mellow out, but the sort of things that used to get me riled up just - they don't matter anymore.
Tavis: I was making a mental note of all the things you said that you are no longer uncomfortable talking about. They may come up in this conversation.
Connick: Oh, that's okay.
Tavis: (Laughs) Over the next 18 minutes. That said, though, I want to stay with the music first. The idea for doing a CD of "Your Songs," our songs, is?
Connick: Well, this was an interesting project for me, Tavis, because I've done 20-some-odd records on my own. When I go into the studio it's a result of deciding whether I want to write the songs, do covers, the arrangements, everything is my decision, which is an incredible luxury for me that I've had since I was 18, making -
Tavis: Very rare.
Connick: Very rare. Clive Davis, who is at my record label - everybody knows who Clive is, of course - asked if I'd be interested in working with him sort of on a collaboration, and when I found out that basically he wanted to feature really, really popular songs that everybody knew, he wanted to feature my singing, to sort of put that out in front, and he also wanted to preserve my own musicality, which basically means not getting another arranger or another producer, just to do it like I've been doing it, but just feature the songs and my voice, I said, "This sounds fun.
"I'm 42, I've done a lot of records, let me try something different." And I had a great time. It was a really cool experience.
Tavis: Given the voice that you have, how hard did you have to work to figure out whether or not your voice would work on the songs that were initially on the list of all the options?
Connick: Well, there were a couple of tunes that Clive suggested that I wasn't so sure about, only because they just never occurred to me. Like I've never thought about singing "London Calling," the Clash tune, but if somebody presented to me I'd have to think about it.
He suggested "Close to You," say, by the Carpenters, and we all know that song. It's a great song, but I never thought about singing it. So I had to say, "Well, how am I going to do it and put my own thing on it?" There were a couple of tunes that came from him that eventually I grew to love and got excited about writing the arrangement for.
Tavis: The voice - I want to stay with the voice for a second. I've talked to all kind of artists over the years. There are some who have worked to find their signature sound; there are others who have discovered it through a variety of processes. The way - that Harry Connick sound, you know what I'm talking about, that voice that we know when we hear it that it's Harry Connick, did you work at that or has it always sounded that way?
Connick: Well, I think over time you develop your own technique, and you also, by virtue of being an individual, have your own sound. If you're fortunate like I've been to have a record deal for the last 20-some-odd years, you have the opportunity to constantly work in a studio environment, in a performing environment, which keeps you in a developmental mode if you choose to be.
The thing about growing up as a jazz musician is that the history is so important to the process that you're usually inundated with influence. Nat Cole, Ross Colombo, Dick Hanes, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, Judy Garland, Sammy Davis, the list goes on and on of people that you studied.
When you're 20, as a jazz musician, and any jazz musician will tell you this, when you're young you not only try to be like them, you try to be them. Saxophone players are transcribing Train solos and Charlie Parker solos. I'm transcribing Monk and Duke, and I'm listening to how Louis Armstrong phrased this and Frank phrased this.
But you're making an investment in the probability that over time, you will eventually emerge with your own style. I think I'm just getting to that point now.
Tavis: At 42.
Connick: I think so, yeah. (Laughter) It takes a long time.
Tavis: I'm finally getting - a whole 25 million records later, I think I'm finally starting to figure out my own sound. Not bad work if you can get it, obviously.
I want to stay with your sound again for just a second here. When you came on the scene, I could see why - I mean, aside from your prodigious talent I could see in my own mind why you would work in the - no disrespect - I could see why you would work in the short run, because for a lot of folk it was a novelty.
Ooh, this guy, to your earlier point, sounds like Sinatra, a Sinatra throwback. I wasn't altogether sure that it would last all these years. I'm glad it has. Were you ever uncertain about that?
Connick: One thing I don't lack is confidence. I've had an incredibly confident personality my whole life. You doubt your own abilities at times. When you put an Art Tatum record on you think, why am I playing piano? Why don't I just quit? (Laughter) But you keep going and you keep working at it.
But for me, when I was sitting in a practice room at 14 and Ellis Marsalis would come in and listen to me practice, the last thing I was thinking about was am I going to make it. I was thinking about I hope I'm getting better, because I want to keep studying with this guy, and if I'm not, he's going to cut me loose.
That type of work ethic, an almost paranoia to become a good musician, trumped any idea of being famous, making money, or being successful in any way, and it stays with me to this day.
So it wasn't so much about am I going to stick around. Whether I was famous or not, I was going to continue to do what I was doing, which was playing and singing and writing and trying to be a better musician.
Tavis: You mentioned a lot of folk already in this conversation. You've mentioned persons who've influenced you, many of them dead before you came into your own. By my count, Ellis Marsalis, of course, the patriarch of the Marsalis family, may very well be the first person you mentioned who you had a chance to work with who is a legend, an icon in his own right.
Talk to me, then, about the persons who are alive, have influenced you in the work that you do.
Connick: Well, Ellis would probably be the biggest living influence, perhaps even including the people who have passed on. He's probably one of my greatest influences because he could really back up what he said. He wasn't one of these guys who was a teacher because perhaps he had failed as a musician. He was a phenomenal father and husband and chose to be an educator probably to support his family, and what an incredibly fortuitous opportunity for me to have him in New Orleans as a readily accessible influence and tutor.
He was probably - yeah, he's probably number one, I'd say, but there's a lot of people. I look at his sons, I look at Branford Marsalis, who not only is a dear friend but I've done recordings with Branford that are just me and him. When you're sitting at the piano and he's playing the saxophone, it's like going into a ring with Ali. You have to have your game.
It's all fun and stuff, but when you actually start working you really have to produce on a certain level. Wynton is the same way. These are living, breathing musicians. Then there's people Kim Burrell, the great gospel singer, or Kelly O'Hara, the incredible Broadway star. These are people that I idolize and that I look up to.
Tavis: The Marsalis brothers are on this project.
Connick: Yeah, both of them play on it.
Tavis: Wynton and Branford on the project. Here's a strange question. Does Harry Connick, Jr. end up being Harry Connick, Jr. if he is not born and bred in New Orleans?
Connick: It's embarrassing to say this, but no. I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you. It's had such a profound effect on who I am. Not only - like my football team, which we're 8 and 0, I'm very proud to say, the New Orleans Saints. (Laughter) That's such a huge part of my life. The food, gumbo, red beans and rice, all of that stuff that we eat down there, crawfish; it's such a huge part of my life. The people down there, the diversity down there, the breadth of the talent. I don't think I'd be here if I were from another town.
Tavis: You have been, as I said at the top of the conversation, as dedicated as anyone in making sure that you did your part to get your hometown rebuilt. I'm working on a project right now that will air on this network next year around the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, already starting on work on that, at least here at PBS.
Your thoughts four and a half years later?
Connick: Well, the good news is that I think it figuratively and literally sort of blew the roof off of a lot of things that needed to be discussed. I think it opened up a very important dialogue with regard to primarily class, but it's been a bittersweet deal because we lost a lot of people, we lost a lot of property.
But the flip side is that the city, in many regards, is better than it was before. There's still a lot of work to be done in the residential areas. That's something that I'm personally very involved with, along with Branford Marsalis. We have the Musician's Village, which is about 80 residences, and we're about to start construction on an 18,000-foot center for music called the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music.
So things are really - there's a picture of the village right now. About 80 percent of the occupants of the village are actually musicians, so that's all great. So I think if that type of effort continues, paralleled with the things that need to go on with tourism and the things that the government has to deal with I think we'll be better than we were before.
Tavis: There is so much, to your earlier point, about New Orleans that is worthy of preserving. I don't know what the question here is. It could be one of two things.
Can you preserve a musical tradition, and is it being preserved in New Orleans? Is that a strange question?
Connick: No, and I think you very definitively can preserve a music tradition. I think it boils down to having places to play. When I was a kid, Tavis, we used to go down to Bourbon Street and there'd be Mahogany Hall, the Famous Door, Tradition Hall, Preservation Hall, Maison Bourbon, and my parents would take me down there in the middle of the day with my sister on a weekend and I'd sit in with the band.
There were places to go to play. Well, that was teetering even prior to Katrina, but certainly after Katrina the amount of available opportunity for young musicians to go and play has certainly diminished quite a bit, so the center - the Ellis Marsalis Center, for example, will be an opportunity to have musicians that are living in the village, older musicians who are great masters, go and teach.
It's like me sitting here telling you about it. It's very much passed on orally; it's passed on by sitting and playing. Yeah, you can pass it on, but we have a responsibility now to do something. When I was growing up, you just assumed that all those clubs - we didn't assume the levies were going to break. I lived two blocks from one of the levies that broke and we used to play on that levy. We never thought it was going to actually get blown apart.
Now we need, just like we have a responsibility to rebuild that, we have a responsibility to rebuild the tradition, and I think it can be done.
Tavis: I'm going to circle back to the CD in just a second. Let me swing out for a second, though, first. When did you feel - because I know how dedicated you are to your craft - when did you feel comfortable enough in your career to semi-turn your attention to acting?
Connick: Well, I've always been a clown, man. (Laughter) Like growing up, my dad, he has a story about me in fifth grade one time, he dropped by the school. My grades weren't particularly good, and he dropped by the school and sort of peeked in the class, and he noticed that the class was paying attention to the teacher and in the back of the classroom was me sitting around a table with about three or four other people.
So he pulled the teacher outside, he said, "Why is my son in the back of the classroom at another table not paying attention to you?" She said, "Harry won't listen to me, so I set him up in the back and the other kids listen to him." (Laughter) So that's kind of the way I've been.
So as hard as I work as a musician, I love to fantasize. I love to pretend. I love to be an artist. When I was about 20 I was playing in a club in L.A. and this woman that was involved in the casting of a movie called "The Memphis Belle" said, "Would you be interested in auditioning?" I couldn't wait to do it. I auditioned and I worked with an ensemble cast, all of whom had infinitely more experience than I did, and I said, "I love this, this is great."
It's like playing a jazz solo. You study, study, study, and then you take it somewhere else. It was the same part of my brain that I felt was being satisfied, so for me, acting was very, very artistically fulfilling. So that's about the time I started.
Tavis: How do you make your choices now, at this point in your life, about what you want to do, what you don't want to do, with regard to roles and characters?
Connick: Tavis, it's all about the money. I'm a ho. (Laughter) Content doesn't matter, the people who write the scripts - it doesn't matter.
Tavis: The content doesn't matter, you just want -
Connick: Does not matter at all. (Laughter) Whoever's paying, I'm playing. No, it's like I think - in a sense, the content doesn't matter. I just - if it's a great story - the last movie I did was with Renee Zellweger. It wasn't Shakespeare, it was a romantic comedy that was a lot of fun to do, and I'm a big Renee Zellweger fan. If somebody said, "Harry, would you like -" or "Tavis, would you like to do a movie with somebody that you really like and it's two months and the director seems to be very talented."
Tavis: And they're paying.
Connick: And they're paying, of course - of course, that would be the first - the requisite. (Laughter) Yeah, I love it, you know what I'm saying? I'm not going to be touring, playing music 12 months a year anyway. I think I would burn out. So fortunately I have a manager who helps me kind of leapfrog these projects, and I say hell, yeah, let me do this movie. I had a heck of a time. It was fun.
Tavis: Speaking of not playing 12 months a year nonstop, some artists who do, obviously, what's your pace these days for doing stuff on the road?
Connick: Well, I had this whole summer off because again, my manager, who I've been with since I was 18, said, "I'm going to give you the whole summer off because you're about to get really busy."
So we recorded the record in the spring, took the summer off, and now I'm doing promotional work for it and it's getting very busy. This is all leading up to January, where we start touring. We'll go all over the world on tour for this.
I have three children now and I'm married, and I don't like to go out on the road for months and months like I used to. I used to love that. It was so exciting. But now I love my kids, man, I love my family, so as much as I love being out there, I've had to sort of find a way to make those worlds coexist.
Tavis: The kids are how old now?
Connick: Georgia, I think that's - yeah, that's her picture right up there, she's 13, Kate is 12, and Charlotte is seven.
Tavis: How does - you were whispering to me before we came on the air here about - I was asking how Jill and the kids were doing, Jill Goodacre, your wife, and you were filling me in about how life is at home. You were saying to me - you asked me, "Tavis, you have kids yet?" And I said, "No, I don't have kids yet," and you were like, "They change your life."
So tell me more about what kids have done for Harry Connick the artist.
Connick: It hasn't affected my art. It really - well, indirectly it has, because I don't - I'm not so angry, man, you know what I'm saying? It's not about let me see who I can prove myself to or I don't like this person so I'm going to talk about that. None of that matters anymore, you know what I'm saying?
I guess what it did - a very famous guy asked me one time, "How do you remain faithful to your wife? There's a lot of women out there, a lot of temptation. How do you do it?" And I said, "I know where my home is. I can go out into the stratosphere artistically, I can do anything I want, because I look over my shoulder and I know how to get back home, and I love my home and I would never do anything to jeopardize that in any way."
But as an artist, it's allowed me to have no inhibitions at all. I feel very, very grounded. Man, I've been with my wife for 20 years, and as you will find out when you, God willing, you have children, if that's what you want, it adds a perspective to your life.
You sort of realize, I'm not here for only - I'm here - I've got to make sure these children eat, that they get love, that they are raised with proper morals and ethics, at least from what I think is proper, and then everything else just became so much easier. It almost heightened my creativity, in a way. It's interesting.
Tavis: I want to circle back to the CD, as I promised, now and talk about some of the stuff on here. Tell me how you made some of the choices that are on here.
Connick: Well, "Mona Lisa's" on there and we all know Nat Cole's version of "Mona Lisa," and what's really interesting about that tune - I love that tune. Do you sing in the shower, or do you sing around the house?
Tavis: I sing in the shower, on TV, anywhere. (Laughter) And you ain't got to pay, just ask me to sing and I'll start singing.
Connick: That's where we part company. (Laughter) No, see, like for me, I'm one of these guys, I like that tune, "Mona Lisa," I think it's a great, great melody, so when this album came around I said, "Man, let's put 'Mona Lisa' on the record." But then you got to think, wait a minute - Nat Cole did it.
Tavis: Yeah, how bold are you to take on "Mona Lisa?"
Connick: Well, so here's the deal. We recorded it in Capitol Studios here in L.A., which is where Nat recorded it.
Tavis: The famous building, the record stack building.
Connick: That's right, and his piano is the piano that I played. So it was intimidating with respect to he had done it. The familiarity was so there, you know what I'm saying? It was, like, in the same room that the guy did it. It was like his aura is everywhere.
But I'm not Nat and he's not me, and I'm not trying to be better than Nat. I just want to sing this tune; much like an actor would interpret a play that's been interpreted hundreds of times before.
So that's how that one came about, and there's a lot of songs on there that are just a joy to sing. "The Way You Look Tonight," and "All the Way."
Tavis: I'll put you on the spot - give me the one that's on here that you were most shaky about. I'm not sure this really belongs here and I'm not sure I did justice to this.
Connick: It would probably be, like, the "Your Song," Elton John's song, and also the Billy Joel song, "Just the Way You Are."
Tavis: It can't be "Your Song," that's the title track here.
Connick: Huh?
Tavis: It can't be "Your Song," that's the title track.
Connick: Well it is, and I'll tell you why. Songwriting has come a long way. If you look at songs like "Mona Lisa or "The Way You Look Tonight," most of the songs on this CD were written by songwriters and were performed by singers.
The common thread between "And I Love Her" by the Beatles and "Your Song" and "Just the Way You Are" is that the composers and the performers are one and the same.
So when you listen to Billy Joel sing "Just the Way You Are," it's not going to be any better than Billy Joel. He's recorded the perfect version. But the thing that's also a little bit tough to unravel is what the melody and what's his personal inflection. It's all - the interpretation that already exists on the first performance of the song, whereas if you take "The Way You Look Tonight," you could look (makes noise) and you can change that however you want.
But I wasn't sure what Billy's - what was the melody, what was Billy. Same with Elton - what's him, what's not. A little bit easier on the Beatles tune, because I think they sang it a little bit straighter, but as I got to really - like when Elton John says - there's a whole verse in there where he says, "I'm sorry, I'm forgetting, but I can't remember whether your eyes are green or they're blue, but anyway, the thing is, what I really mean is that you have the sweetest eyes I've ever seen."
That's great. Those are great lyrics, and I think as I became more familiar with the songs it became more of a pleasure.
Tavis: I'm trying to figure out how great that line really is. You tell a sister, "I can't recall whether your eyes are blue or green, but I'm not sure."
Connick: Yeah, I think telling her that via a poem I think would be -
Tavis: The moral of the story is that's why Harry's married and I'm not. (Laughter) I ain't figured this out yet. What I have figured out is that I love Harry Connick, Jr. If you don't love his voice, there's something wrong with you. His new CD is called "Your Songs." A lot of great covers on here. Harry, always good to talk to you, man.
Connick: You too, Tavis. Thanks so much, man.
Tavis: Thanks for coming to see us, man.
Back to November 17, 2009