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Album Review
by SashaS
8-3-2004
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| Harry Connick Jr's 'Only You' just 4 U |
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Harry Connick Jr: 'Only You'
(Columbia)
Harry Connick Jr - and all other [new] jazz
Music industry has been in turmoil of failing sales and coming short on quality but not on complaints - they’ve been bitching about it for… it feels like - a century! This weeks new releases include such glamorous items as… well, practically nothing. Even Guns N’Roses’ ‘Greatest Hits’ comes out next week… On the indie side, we can’t think past Seachange and their patchy debut ‘Lay Of The Land’ (reviewed tomorrow)… Oh yeah, there is the revivalist Harry Connick Jr’s new disc!
Vogue is a funny thing and six months ago you couldn’t arrest a pop listener for flirting with jazz. Now we have a whole wave-ette of artists getting it on with it and getting pop recognition. Katie Melua on top of the album charts?! Followed by Norah Jones and Jamie Collum’s released in the Top 5; plus, just outside of the Top 10 is another surprise - Joss Stone… ‘Struth, we appear to be in the middle of a mini-jazz renaissance!?
Nothing new actually and it recurs periodically - when kids have had enough of the current pop’s ‘fast food’ crap, pardon - crop, and start looking for something - new (to them). It seems now is the time for a counter reaction to all the popular dookie in the shape of… jazz. Can’t remember that back far but there must have been similar situation at the tail end of the 1980s when crooner Harry Connick Jr came to our attention by reinterpreting songs made famous by the pre-Rock generation.
His success was cemented by his work on the ‘When Harry Met Sally’ soundtrack. [He also did ‘Sleepless In Seattle’ to a lesser effect.] HJ did some acting also [‘Memphis Belle’, ‘Independence Day’] but hasn’t been active of late. Still, he hasn’t lost the touch, as ‘Only You’ exhibits. The man is still going strong, and this latest collection sees him stick close to familiar territory.
This is a velvety coated rendition of old ballads, largely from the time before The Beatles made their first trip Hamburg, or even earlier in some cases. A true sense of light romanticism is re-created by Connick Jr, and it’s a faithful pastiche of a period that was steeped in its own clichés: men were men and the women were dames. It is a warm music once found in smoky jazz-dives in some downtown that no-goodniks and broads frequented.
‘Only You’ may be best suited to the more mature audience out there. But then, there may lie a problem: the oldsters would certainly go for the real deal and the younger ones have new hero, their own ‘Frank Sinatra’ - Jamie Collum. ‘Only You’ is a fine album - containing classic sounding standards such as ‘My Blue Heaven’, ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ and ‘Save The Last Dance For Me’ - pleasant dinner party music, or your trendy bar’s background noise, but it will suffer from the new talent grabbing all the attention.
The sad fate of a revivalist is - sounding like imitators. Pianist Paul Smith, who has played for most of the greatest musicians, joked that he was tempted to quit playing in clubs because people kept asking for Harry Connick’s songs, which turn out to be songs Smith has been playing long before this Junior was born!
In spite, it is so good to get one’s feet up and turn off all the avant-artisanry of every hour in the day and revisit some simpler time’s music - the pop of its day - that sounds like if it were from a parallel universe at the period in history when politicians spin greater fiction than novelists!
7/10
SashaS
8-3-2004
Harry Connick Jr’s album ‘Only You’ is released 08 March 2004 by Columbia
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