Harry Connick in Tune With Yesteryear

How do you explain Harry Connick Jr.?

The 20-year-old pianist, who can be heard tonight at the Palace Court, is a wild anachronism. While other youngsters were copying the latest solos by Chick Corea or McCoy Tyner, Connick was busy diving into Earl Hines and Erroll Garner. The lad simply refuses to go with the fashionable flow.

Actually, there is a simple explanation. He is the son of distinguished parents (his father has been the New Orleans district attorney since 1973; his late mother was a judge) who, while they were going through law school in the 1950s, owned a record store.

“I got my grounding through those records,” Connick says, “and through being in New Orleans around so much music. Then from the eighth grade until halfway through my junior year, I studied with Ellis Marsalis at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts.”

Wynton and Branford Marsalis had graduated before Connick entered their father’s class, but Delfeayo Marsalis, now 23, was in class with Connick; they became close, and last year, after Wynton had recommended Connick to CBS Records, Delfeayo was assigned to produce his first album.

Throughout his teen years (which ended last September), Connick was encouraged by his family. “They would take me down to the French Quarter almost every weekend to sit in; in fact, I started playing gigs at 13, and occasionally I subbed for Ellis when he couldn’t make a job.”

His indoctrination into the glories of yesteryear came about mainly through records that are not a part of the average youngster’s background nowadays.

Asked how he explains that so few pianists of his age listen to the old masters rather than to Hancock and Corea, he replied, “They don’t know, man, they just don’t know. I figure like this: The most piano playing was done when Art Tatum and Duke Ellington and Monk and Fats Waller and Bud Powell and James P. Johnson and all those guys were around. Everybody else is hearsay.

“Monk could play that stride stuff if he wanted to. Herbie Hancock is old enough to know where that school comes from. But who am I to try to understand what McCoy Tyner is doing?

“I think I’d run into the same problems Earl Hines had; not that I put myself on his level, but he wanted to sound like a trumpet player--when he made those masterpieces with Louis Armstrong they called him the trumpet-style pianist. Well, I’ll do anything I can to get to the same kind of licks Earl was using; he’s been a big, big influence.”

Unlike his first album, the second, Connick says, will introduce him as a singer. “I’ve always enjoyed singing, but I decided if I want to document it I’d better get a teacher; so I did, and then I went into the studio for CBS and recorded about 35 tunes, out of which some 25 had vocals, and the best of them will be in the album.”

Not surprisingly, his vocal influences too are traditional: “I love Billie (Holiday), Pops (Louis Armstrong), Sinatra, Ella (Fitzgerald), Nat King Cole.” But he grants that vocally and instrumentally he still has much to learn, and is soaking it all up as fast as he can.

“I’ve been heavily into Duke Ellington’s piano playing lately. You know, you can hear so much of Duke in Thelonious Monk’s work; that’s pretty much where Monk got all his stuff.

“You know how I figure things? They say after Beethoven, nobody really accomplished anything more than he did. If you draw the comparison, you’ll find the same thing with what I’m studying--I mean, after Tatum or Ellington, how much more complex can you get?

“If I can figure those guys out, everything else will be downhill.”