Harry Connick, Jr.: My mom always wanted me to play at Carnegie Hall. She, she knew that I loved music from when I was a little kid. On what would have been my mom's 100th birthday, I walked out and I performed a piece of music I wrote for her. Joann Butler: How old were you when you started playing?
Harry Connick, Jr.: They tell me I was three. I don't remember that, but, you know, I made my first album when I was nine. Joann Butler: And your father got you lessons with Booker, right? Harry Connick, Jr.: It was an incredible childhood.
It would be like if you were a basketball player and your parents were friends with Michael Jordan. Joann Butler: A beautiful tribute to your mother. Harry Connick, Jr.: It's not only about my mom. It's about every woman.
I was so lucky that he called me that day when I was 19 or 20 and, and asked me if I would sing some songs. And it was one of the greatest strokes of luck I've ever had. I've done four Christmas albums. I could probably do four more.
Joann Butler: Has your relationship with the piano changed at all since you were a kid? Harry Connick, Jr.: Oh, what a great question. I don't think anyone's ever asked me that. Hi, you're watching Joann Butler In Studio With… me, Harry Connick, Jr.
Joann Butler: Harry Connick, Jr. in the house. Welcome to LifeMinute. Harry Connick, Jr.: Thank you. It's great to be with you.
Joann Butler: Oh, so happy to have you. You have a beautiful new album and a new book, Babe: Elaboratio, a beautiful tribute to your mother. Harry Connick, Jr.: Thank you. My mom always wanted me to play at Carnegie Hall.
She, she knew that I loved music from when I was a little kid. And when I really started getting into it, like five, six years old, she used to tell me all the time, "That's my dream for you to play at Carnegie Hall." Well, a couple of years passed, and she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer when I was around 10. So, I called Carnegie Hall from New Orleans and I asked them if I could play there. And they said, "This is the box office.
We, we don't really hire talent." So, my mom died when I was 13, and I didn't have a chance to play there. So, I decided that I was going to wait for a special occasion, not only to do some kind of tribute to her, but to even go into Carnegie Hall. So, for decades, I never went inside. I had never been inside that hall.
And about 8 years ago, my manager called Carnegie Hall and asked if they had May 22nd, 2026 available because that would have been my mom's 100th birthday. And I waited until 7:30 that night, never having walked into that room, and then at 8:00, I walked out and I performed a piece of music I wrote for her. Joann Butler: Amazing. What did that feel like?
Harry Connick, Jr.: It's hard to describe. I don't really get nervous before performances. I love to play, and I love to be on stage, but it was a strange feeling because, you know, 45 years I had thought about what it would be like to play on that stage, and all of a sudden I was there. And I don't remember much about it.
I remember being very emotional during the performance, but I don't remember a whole lot about the show itself. Joann Butler: What do you think she would have said? She knows you made it. Harry Connick, Jr.: I think she would have been thrilled because she was the type of person that was very open about her love for me and for my sister, and she was very communicative and she let everybody know that, you know, she was proud of her children.
So, I think she would have been really happy. Joann Butler: Yeah, what a woman. Harry Connick, Jr.: Yeah she was something else. Joann Butler: I didn't know that whole backstory about how young you were when you lost her, and that both your parents were record store owners when you were little, and then, of course, they were attorneys.
Amazing. She was a judge, your dad was a DA. Tell us about that upbringing. Harry Connick, Jr.: Well, it was, it was really amazing and at the time, it was sort of all I knew.
My mother met my father when she was in Morocco. She didn't have a great home life in New York. She was born in 1926 in New York and ended up leaving when she was in her mid-20s. She went to Europe.
She ended up in the Middle East, just sort of, you know, traveling around looking for work. I think she had a secretarial job somewhere in Istanbul, and then she found some work in Morocco. My dad happened to be in Morocco working for the Corps of Engineers and they're both in their, you know, mid-20s, and they met, fell in love, and eloped. And then when it was time to come back to New Orleans, my dad's hometown, in 1953 or '54, my dad got tuberculosis.
So, he had to stay on bed rest over there. And my mom flew back by herself to this town she had never been to, New Orleans, and moved in with her in-laws, whom she had never met. My mom couldn't really get work because she was this Jewish woman from New York, and New Orleans was kind of a provincial town back then, and weren't really too excited about hiring this woman from out of town. Maybe the Jewish thing had something to do with it.
So, she started her own little record store. My dad came back, was still on bed rest, but helped her get the store going. And they saved money to go to law school, and then about, 10 years later, my sister was born and then I was born after that. Joann Butler: Amazing.
You've written this beautiful music that tells the three parts of, of her life that you just said, and then the companion book. What made you think of that idea? Harry Connick, Jr.: When I sat down to write the music, I knew I wanted to start with her nickname, Babe. So, fortunately those letters are in the musical scale: B-A-B-E.
I wrote those. I started to expand on that. And as I started getting deeper into the music, I wanted to write down the ideas so I wouldn't forget, like, you know, in measure 22, you have trumpets playing or snare drums playing this rhythm. Like, I didn't want to forget all that.
So, I started to kind of write that down just as a diary. Then I started to think, well, I want to write about what I'm imagining my mother was like, and it became a little bit more expanded. And then I decided, well, maybe this could be a book that could sort of go along with the music, and if people are interested in the music, they'll learn a little bit more about my mom and why I chose to write those things. So, I kind of wrote them both simultaneously over the period of about six weeks.
Joann Butler: Well you did a beautiful job. That was such a good idea. Harry Connick, Jr.: Thank you. Joann Butler: I was listening while I was reading.
Harry Connick, Jr.: You're the first person I've talked to that's, because that was the idea, and I didn't know if anyone would actually do that. Did you find it was easy to kind of... Joann Butler: Yes. Harry Connick, Jr.: Did it make sense?
Joann Butler: Yes. Harry Connick, Jr.: Wow, that's cool. Joann Butler: And a 60 or 70 piece orchestra, your big band? Harry Connick, Jr.: Yeah.
So, when I put it together, I was thinking about different musical instrument configurations that I could do. Would I have Hungarian instruments for the Hungarian side of my mom's family? Or would I, you know, would it be jazz or what would it be? And I, I took all those ideas out of my head and just started writing what I wanted to write.
It turned out to be a full orchestra, you know, 70, 80 musicians plus my big band. So, there's a lot of people on the record and a lot of people that, that were with me at Carnegie Hall. Joann Butler: What does New York sound like versus New Orleans? Harry Connick, Jr.: That's such a great question because if someone were to ask you to describe New York, you, you would have your way to describe it.
Same as me. I wasn't trying to write what sounded like New York as much as when I see my mom as a little girl walking through the streets, what did that sound like? And it didn't have to sound like New York as much as the feeling of it. It's hard to describe, but it wasn't like I, I was writing music that was in New York at that time.
I wasn't trying to write '30s sounding music. I was just writing what it could be. There, there's a, a part in the music where my mom meets my dad and you think it would be this, you know, lush romantic thing, but it, it doesn't really sound, because I wrote with no preconceived notions, I just wrote what I felt like at the time. It, it, it's hard to describe it.
It just sort of kind of wrote itself in a weird way. Joann Butler: So amazing. How, and it just comes, it just comes? Harry Connick, Jr.: Yeah.
Like if you sat in a room with a tape recorder and described something from your life, you may not be able to articulate it right away. But if you sort of closed your eyes and imagined, and just sort of let yourself be present and peaceful, you, you really can't predict what you're going to say, and that's what it is. It's this unpredictable snapshot of that moment in time. Joann Butler: And you were, how old were you when you started playing?
Harry Connick, Jr.: So, I was, they tell me I was three. I don't remember that, but, you know, I, I wasn't really playing anything great, I was just kind of plunking around. And then I got really into it when I was probably six or seven, when I really started taking lessons. And then, you know, I made my first album when I was nine.
And I was playing, you know, classical music and stuff not long after that. So, I was pretty, I'm glad I could do that because I couldn't do anything else. Joann Butler: Oh, I don't know about that. You do quite a lot.
Harry Connick, Jr.: Well, I mean, I was, I wasn't a good student, you know? I wasn't a good athlete. Like, I just, I'm glad I had music. That was, that was my saving grace.
Joann Butler: It's amazing. How, what was it like? Like, well, obviously they were both into music, too, but, and your father got you lessons with Booker, right? Harry Connick, Jr.: Yeah that’s right.
Joann Butler: Tell us about that. Harry Connick, Jr.: Well, James Booker was an amazing, brilliant musical genius from New Orleans, and my parents knew him, and they, they would take me to see him play. And I kind of developed a little relationship with him, and would always ask him if, if I could take lessons from him. And he was kind enough to, to stop by the house sometimes and show me things.
And, you know, looking back, I think about the musicians I played with and it would be like if you were a basketball player and, you know, your parents were friends with Michael Jordan, you know, and you got, you say, "Hey, Michael, can you show him a few things or?" It was an incredible childhood. Joann Butler: Amazing. And I can't believe how much you remember too at 13. Harry Connick, Jr.: Yeah.
Oh, yeah. Well, those were such formative years. And because my mom died, I think I remember things maybe in a heightened way because of that. Like, some, some years blur together, like if you said, you know, "What were you doing when you were 42?" I'd have to really stop and think.
But those years are, are very clear. Joann Butler: It's beautiful. And what made you want to tell your mom's story without words? Harry Connick, Jr.: It's hard to articulate a lot of the feelings I have about my mom because they're very pure feelings of love and respect and security.
So, that's part of it. The other part of it is there's something beautiful about the abstractness and the romanticism of, of instrumental music, where you might feel one thing when, when it's played, I might feel something else. And so, there were, there were things in there that I wanted to tell specifically, which is what I wrote about in the book. And there are other things that I didn't really want to speak specifically about, some of the tough things my mom went through as a kid, but I wanted the feeling of that.
So, you're able to write about things and sort of hide them in plain sight, and, and maybe you'll evoke something emotionally. I know what it invoked in me, but it doesn't sort of tell you how to feel. Like if I write, you know, a song about my plant died, without you knowing that, you might feel any number of emotions, but if I say, "Hey, this is about that," I'm sort of telling you. And so, I didn't want to sort of dictate to people how to feel.
I wanted to, because it's not only about my mom, it's about every woman. It's about every mother, because the impact my mom had on me in 13 years is so profound. I realized through the course of writing this that this goes way beyond my mom. This is about women.
This is about mothers and how infinitely powerful that is. And I wanted to sort of leave a little bit of it, you know, open-ended. Joann Butler: Beautiful. And of course, you have three girls.
Harry Connick, Jr.: I do. Joann Butler: Did they learn even more about their grandma? Harry Connick, Jr.: It's been incredible watching them through this process. We also shot a documentary about this whole event of writing the music, retracing my mom's steps in Morocco, in New York, in New Orleans.
And all three of my daughters were very involved. So much so that my daughter Georgia, who is a filmmaker, directed it and edited it. The other two were very much involved in the production of it. So, you know, when I go in the edit bay and I see Georgia sitting in front of this computer for 12 hours a day studying this film and learning about my mom and the footage of my mom, like, it's, it's really, it's been an incredible experience for our family.
You know, it's, it's brought us a lot of joy, in a very specific way. Joann Butler: Beautiful. What do you think your mom taught you about being a parent? Harry Connick, Jr.: So much.
She was a great believer in the discovery process. So, rather than sort of offer unsolicited advice, she was a person who believed in sort of experiential learning. She, she would allow me to figure things out for myself. I remember, she was Jewish and she put me in Hebrew school when I was really, really little.
And there's an audio tape, my dad was recording me and my mom, like a little interview when I was like three, and we had learned about Mordecai that day in school, and my mom said, "Well, who'd you learn about?" I said, "Mordecai." She said, "Well, who was he?" And I said who he was. And the first question she asked me was, "What color was his face?" And out of all the questions she could have asked, and I said, "Brown." And what I didn't understand at the time was what my mother was telling me without telling me was excellence comes in all shades, and you will figure this out as you grow. She didn't beat it into me in some heavy-handed way. She, she was all about allowing me to figure things out and sort of presenting these general guidelines.
She did it constantly and, and letting me figure out things, which is an amazing luxury. And as a parent, I tried to employ a lot of those same techniques. Joann Butler: Yeah, so cool. What about the story where she, when you wanted to run away and she went with you?
Harry Connick, Jr.: Yeah. I was in my room, I was having a terrible tantrum. I was pretty emotional as a kid. I went into my room, five, six years old, and was throwing clothes in a suitcase, crying.
She said, "What are you doing?" I said, "I'm, I don't want to live here anymore. I want to run away." And she said, "All right." She walked away and came back a couple of minutes later with her suitcase. And I remember her standing there in the doorway. I said, "What are you doing?" She goes, "You know, I thought about it.
You're right. I don't want to live here anymore either." And I'm like, "Really?" And she said, "Let's go." And we went outside, we got into her car, she turned on the car, and I started bawling. She’d go, "What? What's wrong?" I said, "I don't want to run away." She goes, "I don't want to run away either." Now, that's a, you know, she wasn't like that all the time.
It wasn't this like you figure everything out. I mean, if I was walking into oncoming traffic, she would be a mother. But many times, she would provide these situations for me to kind of discover it myself. And that's an amazing way to develop trust with a parent.
When you, when you don't feel like they're overbearing with advice, if, if they kind of sit back and let you make mistakes, you're invariably going to come up and say, "Wait, what do I do here?" And, and that's the kind of relationship I had with her and my dad, and the kind of relationship my wife and I have with our daughters. Joann Butler: Beautiful. So good. Has your relationship with the piano changed at all since you were a kid?
Harry Connick, Jr.: Oh, what a great question. I don't think anyone's ever asked me that. It really has. When I was a little boy, it was like a magical box.
Like I would press down on this key and a sound would come out, and I didn't understand that, how that worked. And you play two of them at one time, two notes will come out. And you can also, you know it's a percussion instrument, so you can play it like a drum and play different rhythms. And this chord sounds sad, and this chord sounds happy.
And wait, you can do two different things at the same time. You can play a melody with one of the hands. And that was really magical to me. I didn't understand what any of it meant.
I didn't know what the keys meant. And then as I started studying a little bit and understood that there's more efficient ways to move your fingers and there's other ways to play this chord. It's like, it's like a thesaurus. Like you could play a C chord, but there's other ways to say that.
Like you can play it low and spread it out and have a certain feeling. You could play it high. And then I started surrounding myself with people who intimately understood the instrument and realized I don't have a clue how this thing works. And then you really get into the, the theory of it.
So, you have the hard, hardwired kind of passion to play, but when you, when you couple that with craft and technique, it's like being a painter and you have all these colors, and at one point you're like, "Well, what happens if I mix blue and green?" You don't know, but then when you know that that's going to make purple, and if you add this, that'll change. When you have the craft to go along with the desire, it's immensely powerful. And so that was my goal, is to learn as much as I could. And I'm still learning.
There's still, "Oh, I didn't know those two notes could go together." I mean, after all these years, I'm still figuring stuff out. Joann Butler: Amazing. What about your voice? When did you know you could sing, too?
Harry Connick, Jr.: Well, you know, when I was a little boy, Louis Armstrong was my hero. So, I used to imitate him, and my mom used to worry I would mess up my voice because you have to, you know, gravelly. And then when I got to be about 18 or 19, I started singing in the way I sing now. I just didn't know how.
And I practiced and I had one month of lessons by a terrific vocal trainer, singer named Marion Cowings here in New York. And he sort of explained to me what to do so that you can do it every night, so that you don't, you know, hurt yourself or give yourself nodules or whatever. And I used those very basic techniques over time to try to accommodate what I was doing with my voice. And it was just, I remember when I would be in these concerts and I'd start singing, it would, people would listen in a different way.
Instrumental music is great, and when you sing, it just, it brings people in, in a, in a different kind of way. So, I'm just glad that I love to do both. Joann Butler: Christmas music? Harry Connick, Jr.: Oh, I love that.
It's endless. I've done four Christmas albums. I could probably do four more just because there's so, so much great music and I love that time of year. I think it's such a wonderful time of year.
And I've been so lucky that people have associated nice memories of Christmas with music that I've done. It's just an amazing feeling. Joann Butler: It's the best. Yeah.
Harry Met Sally... It's like, it's, you've made that movie and it's like coming back again. Harry Connick, Jr.: So cool. Joann Butler: What do you think it is about it that…
Harry Connick, Jr.: Rob Reiner was an incredible talent and he was just a master filmmaker, and, and I was so lucky that he called me that day when I was, you know, 19 or 20 and, and asked me if I would, you know, sing some songs. And it was one of the greatest strokes of luck I've ever had. Joann Butler: Amazing. So great, I could keep you for another hour.
Harry Connick, Jr.: No, it was so fun.
