Music : Connick Brings Baby Boomers Back to Yesteryear’s Standards : Pop: Singer-pianist and his 15-piece band find mass appeal with a ‘30s and ‘40s repertoire.

Remember how some pop purists in the ‘60s used to get all exercised wondering whether a white man could sing the blues?

Harry Connick Jr.’s rise poses a parallel question: Can a young man sing the olds?

At 22, the singer-pianist from New Orleans has found a mass audience while moving along the most unlikely path to pop stardom. In a rock ‘n’ roll age, Connick is staking his claim as a singer of swing-era standards.

Fueled by the success of his album of songs from the film “When Harry Met Sally . . . ,” Connick and his 15-piece big band played to a sold-out house Saturday night at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. (Connick also is scheduled to appear Tuesday at the Arlington Theater in Santa Barbara and Friday at the Universal Amphitheatre.)

The audience of 3,000 included a substantial number of baby boomers probably raised on Presley and the Beatles rather than the ‘30s and ‘40s standards that form the core of Connick’s repertoire, which is now augmented by well-wrought, backward-looking originals from his new album, “We Are in Love.”

In one sense, Connick failed to supply an overwhelmingly affirmative answer to the question of whether a singer who came to majority during the second Reagan Administration can do full justice to songs dating back to the ex-President’s Gipper days.

Connick’s singing was serviceable and never callow, but far from commanding. His tone was nasal, his texture thin. When it comes to the standards, Tony Bennett at 63 and Sinatra at 74 are better bets today than Connick is ever likely to be.

But overall, Connick showed that he may be the man to help the boomers appropriate the tradition for themselves. He performed with a showman’s flair and an enthusiasm for his music that could inject it with currency for a new audience who might otherwise regard it only as the soundtrack for an earlier generation’s nostalgia.

With his movie-star looks, his streamlined, retro-elegant sartorial style and hip-shaking, arm-waving stage presence, Connick could be Broadway’s great re-popularizer.

A versatile piano stylist, he moved freely between swing sources and the distinctive, choppy-but-rolling stride piano rhythms of New Orleans. For the most part, though, he was inclined to keep himself reined in. His playing was assured, tasteful and orderly, but rarely gripping or surprising.

Connick didn’t rein in his personality, however, or his opinions. At one point he wrote off virtually all contemporary pop as “blatant and classless.” If Connick’s role is to bring the swing era’s style and grace to rock-tuned ears, boxing those ears with dismissive, unfounded generalizations isn’t going to help his cause.