Harry Connick Jr.’s Cole Porter album tour coming to Phoenix
Ed Masley
Harry Connick Jr. was more than 30 years deep in a career that’s seen him send more albums to the top of Billboard’s jazz chart than anyone in music history when he felt the time had come to record his first album devoted entirely to the work of a single composer.
The choice of composers was obvious, Cole Porter being the New Orleans jazz and funk bandleader’s favorite composer.
“I think his lyrics are special,” Connick says. “And his melodies are kind of unorthodox and unique. He had the largest collection of songs I could relate to. There’s a lot of great composers I could have picked, but if I had to pick one, that’s the reason. I just think he’s a special composer.”
“True Love: A Celebration of Cole Porter” is Connick’s first album on Verve Records, which issued seminal recordings by jazz legends Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone.
Released in October, it brought Connick’s total of No. 1 appearances on Billboard’s
Top Jazz Album chart to 14.
Porter’s music, composed primarily for Broadway and Hollywood, represents a vital chapter in the Great American Songbook. It includes such standards as “Night and Day,” “Begin the Beguine,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love.”
Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra are among the artists who preceded Connick in devoting an entire album to Porter’s work.
Putting his own stamp on Porter classics
Connick made it a point, he says, to not go back and listen to those albums.
“I do have favorite recordings,” he says. “There’s great recordings of all these songs. I just thought it was really important to start fresh and put my own stamp on this stuff. I didn’t have any real interest in kind of rehashing anybody else’s interpretation.”
Choosing which songs to tackle from a repertoire as vast and oft-interpreted as Porter’s did not require the level of soulsearching one might imagine.
“There were some songs that I was quite familiar with that I knew I wanted to record,” he says.
“I Concentrate on You,” for instance, which he loves.
“Then, I just started doing a deep dive, really digging through the songs,” he says.
“There’s over 800. And I didn’t even have to go through all 800 because I would stumble upon some that I wasn’t as familiar with and love them. When you combine those with the songs I knew I wanted to record, I very quickly had enough for the album and I just stopped there and said, ‘These are great; let’s do these.’”
Revisiting 80-year-old songs
Asked if he thought it important to have a mix of songs that some listeners would instantly recognize along with more obscure selections, Connick replies, “Yes and no.”
He thought it was cool that it turned out that way, he says.
“But as I started asking people what they thought about Cole Porter, not only did most of them not know who Cole Porter was, nobody knew the songs. You gotta remember, it’s 2019 (when the album was in production). A lot of these songs were written 60, 80 years ago. So it didn’t really matter how familiar the songs were. Because most people don’t really know them.”
In addition to singing and playing piano, Connick was the album’s arranger, orchestrator and conductor, a far bigger challenge than singing and playing.
“It’s just a lot of notes,” Connick says, with a laugh.
“As an arranger and an orchestrator, it takes a long time to write out each note for the orchestra and to get it the way you want it. And conducting is a fairly complex process because there’s so many musicians and you want to make sure that your vision is being represented. But that’s what I signed up for. That’s what I love to do. So it was a thrill every step of the way.”
Asked if he took the way he planned to phrase the songs into consideration as he worked on the arrangements, Connick says he doesn’t like to overthink the phrasing going in.
“The main thing is to have a good kind of a bed upon which you can sing and still change the phrasing depending on what you’re feeling and have things not be in your way,” he says.
“It gets a little tricky sometimes when you really kind of get into the nitty gritty of it, but for the most part, the song is the song. If you really start screwing around with it, you might run into some trouble but I just make sure I give myself enough leeway to interpret it in different ways depending on what I’m feeling at the time.”
‘You start seeing what a rascal he was’
There were no major revelations about Porter’s music in the process of recording “True Love,” Connick says, because he knew the kind of composer he was going in.
“But when you deal with the specifics of it, you start seeing what a rascal he was,” he says. “I mean, he did a lot of kind of unorthodox things and had a lot of fun, intentionally throwing things in that really shouldn’t be there. And I love that, but I kind of knew that before, which is why I liked him so much.”
The album should speak to anyone who came to Connick through his mainstream breakthrough, singing “It Had to Be You” and other standards on the Grammywinning soundtrack to the 1989 rom-com “When Harry Met Sally.” But he said he’s never felt the need to stay within any particular boundary.
“If I had to go by what people thought, I don’t think it would be as comfortable a process for me,” he says. “So I don’t really know what people think. You can’t live like that. You’ve gotta go do what you want to do.”
As to what Connick wants to do next, he’ll decide that when he gets there.
“I’m with a brand new record company,” he says. “And they’ve been really great. So I’d like to know what they think. I could do 10 different albums right now. And I don’t really care which one it is because I love it all. So I’m gonna wait until the time comes when they say, ‘It’s time to do another record’ and take it from there.”
What to expect on Connick’s ‘True Love’ tour
Before the tour that makes its way to Arizona Federal Theatre on March 1, Connick staged “A Celebration of Cole Porter,” a Broadway show he conceived and directed, at the Nederlander Theatre.
“True Love: An Intimate Performance” is a very different type of show, without the choreography and video production that went into the Broadway run.
“This show is much more intimate,” he says. “It’s really about songs, and I’m gonna be playing lots of other songs besides Cole Porter. The Broadway show was all Cole Porter. And it was really dedicated to him with a 25-piece orchestra. This is a much smaller group in a much more intimate setting.”
These performances allow him too explore the full range of his musical aesthetic.
“This tour is gonna be a lot more nimble,” he says. “We’ll change the songs every night. I might play songs from my funk albums. I might play stuff I’ve never recorded. It’s just gonna be more of a spur-of-the-moment kind of feel with Cole Porter sort of being at the center of it.”
On keeping his creative options open
Music is just one of several creative outlets Connick has enjoyed since “When Harry Met Sally...” introduced him to the mainstream. He launched an acting career with 1990’s “Memphis Belle” and landed his first leading-man performance eight years later in “Hope Floats.”
Connick stars in a forthcoming thriller with Katherine Heigl titled “Fear of Rain.” “I play the father of a girl with schizophrenia,” he says. “And it’s pretty intense.”
He also starred on “Will & Grace” (as Grace’s husband), served as a judge for three years on “American Idol” and hosted a daytime talk show, “Harry,” for two seasons.
“I’ve always been like that,” he says of having multiple creative outlets.
“I’m a terrible painter. A terrible sculptor. But I still love doing it. Obviously, I’m the most comfortable doing the things that I choose to do publicly but I just like having different creative outlets. You could put me in a room with a sketch pad and a pencil and I’d be happy in there until you let me out.”