He gets it

Harry Connick Jr., the jazz crooner better known to Generation Y as the SunCom guy, is impossible to contact.

This might be because he doesn’t have “the network” (as emblematized by the other cell phone guy, the one with the nerd glasses), or because he’s so busy doing, well, everything. He just finished a run in the Broadway revival of The Pajama Game, he has a movie in post-production, he was spotted at New York Fashion Week on the arm of one Anna Wintour, and Jan. 30 marked the release of two of his CDs—the nostalgic Oh, My NOLA and the instrumental Chanson Du Vieux Carre.

No one would be surprised if the musician announced his candidacy for the 2008 presidency—the only shocker would be if he lost. Because, as much as everyone hates an overachiever, mention the name Harry Connick Jr. and critics go all swoony.

Perhaps the fact that the guy doesn’t return phone calls is his sole deliberate flaw, like the one mistake Kashmiri weavers purposefully work into their rugs so as not to siphon glory from a perfect God.

Just a theory.

When Harry met Katrina

“Having been accused of everything from dilettantism to downright disloyalty to his jazz roots, Connick can now, with the release of these like-minded albums, hoist a well-manicured middle finger to the cynical minority,” muses JazzTimes. “This is Connick’s shining hour.”

And he rides into the spotlight on a Hurricane Katrina-powered wave.

In an interview with The Rotarian last summer, Connick said he felt an immediate tug to visit New Orleans after Katrina. “I was down there Tuesday, the day after the flooding started,” he recalled. “I just wanted to help.”

At the time, asked if he’d write about the experience, he said, “It’s still too fresh; I’m sure I will.”

Of his new single, “All These People,” a catchy tune about those stranded in the New Orleans Convention Center during the Katrina aftermath, Connick opines on an artistdirect.com video interview, “The last thing I wanted to do was go write a song about it.”

He added, “When I recorded this set of CDs, the spirit wasn’t so hot, you know. In fact, there’s still a lot of just grieving going on. I didn’t think these records should represent that … I thought that they should be joyous, happy records. It’s just to say that New Orleans is full of people who love to have a good time. You know that expression, laissez les bon temps rouler—let the good times roll? Let ‘em roll—don’t stop the good times. And I wanted to give my contribution to that philosophy.”

A nod to flood-ravaged New Orleans lends credibility to any artistic endeavor these days. Even Brad and Angelina, perhaps finally tired of Africa, recently bought a house in the French Quarter.

And then there are the star-powered benefit CDs: Hurricane Relief: Come Together Now featured Sting, Coldplay and Wynonna Judd; Higher Ground Hurricane Benefit Relief Concert boasted Shirley Caesar, Cassandra Wilson and a couple Nevilles; Tab Benoit, Dr. John, 504 Boyz, Fats Domino, and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band also released fundraising discs. Connick, who lent his talents to a number of those efforts, upped the ante by earmarking proceeds from his own two discs to his pet project, the New Orleans Habitat Musician’s Village.

“The idea came about of starting a community, a village,” the singer tells artistdirect.com. “Building houses to bring the musicians back [who] had been evacuated, and giving them a place to live … so we joined up with Habitat for Humanity and started this project called Musician’s Village. … It’s a real benchmark idea for the whole community, because to this day, it’s still sort of the only large-scale residential construction project going on in New Orleans.”

It seems that Connick has a modified Midas effect, whereby all he touches turns to gold, but with none of the backlash—save the only mildly insulting nickname “Hollywood Harry.”

A Sinatra fan, he started his music career in New Orleans two decades ago, managing to embody the city’s soulful jazz essence without also imbibing its seedy underbelly. In 1989, he recorded the soundtrack to When Harry Met Sally and promptly won a Grammy. The following year he applied not just his musical chops but his lady-killer looks to the big screen (Memphis Belle, Little Man Tate, Hope Floats, etc.), and then, in 2002, to the small screen (“Will and Grace”). He moved to New York. He married a model. He aged impressively well, pushing 40 without breaking a sweat.

In fact, the only smudges on Connick’s résumé are a 1992 arrest for gun possession and a mid-‘90s dabbling with funk. (Amusingly, his 1995 funk tour of China was televised and dubbed the “Shanghai Gumbo Special.”)

“New Orleans is my essence and my soul because, artistically, I think everything I have to offer is based on my experiences,” Connick informed artistdirect.com. “I [had] an infinite amount of experiences in New Orleans that led me to be the artist I am today.”