My heroes

Soundtrack to "When Harry Met Sally..."; Harry Connick, Jr., piano and vocals

I don’t remember establishing anybody, in my youth, other than my dad, as a hero. I have never cared for sports very much. When I entered the third grade, my little nine-member class from Bruce merged with the larger class in the school district in Volga. And all of my new friends talked about Roger Staubach and Fran Tarkenton or Reggie Jackson and Hank Aaron. I had no idea who they were talking about.

For a while, when people would ask me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I remember that I used to say that I wanted to be a school bus driver. “Why?” Mr. Strandy was my school bus driver and I really liked him. A nice job that’s good enough for him is good enough for me.

Subconsciously, I guess I was in the market for a hero. I was ready to be razzled; ready to be dazzled. But nothing showed up to draw my interest for a long time. I was the proverbial poster boy of "man with bag of potato chips lookin’ for a party."

But before too long, as you can imagine, famous musicians began to emerge on my radar. When the movie “The Sting” was released, I initiated an infatuation with the music of Scott Joplin. Mr. Joplin served a term as one my heroes. While still in high school, I became aware of the sensationalism of classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz. Mr. Horowitz took a turn at idol status. Then when I got to college, Hope D. made me aware of not only the vocal stylings of Frank Sinatra, but the entire repertoire of The Great American Songbook. Mr. Sinatra’s heroism took a while to ingest and digest.

I first came across Harry Connick, Jr.’s name in a Time or Newsweek article that casually mentioned his contribution to the film “When Harry Met Sally”, directed by Rob Reiner. The short blurb mostly served to advertise his upcoming stint at the Oak Room in the Algonquin Hotel in New York, but it gave a little background on his childhood in New Orleans and his famous District Attorney father, Harry Connick, Sr.

My friends and I enjoyed the movie and agreed that Mr. Connick, Jr.’s part in the movie’s success stood toe to toe with everyone else’s. I thought no more about him after that, really, until I saw that the Cincinnati Zoo had included him and his band in their lineup for the zoo’s annual jazz festival called Jazzoo. So my friends and I got tickets. And … Whoa! I remember thinking – OMG! It’s Joplin, Horowitz and Sinatra all rolled into one! I had never encountered so much raw musical talent amassed in one person. And with so much energy! No doubt. I had a new hero. And it felt strange, because I was two years older than him.

Obviously, at the time, I marveled at Mr. Connick, Jr.’s talent and technique, and rightly so; it was and is a facility to be reckoned with. But I realize, now, that his true feat of accomplishment was in reviving an old-school style of music and getting other people to be excited about it. In a society and economy that values new and trendy, where the period of fashion gets shorter and shorter, when a chic accessory of fashion can be deemed “so six weeks ago”, it must require a Herculean effort to turn the tide and to redeclare vogueness where vogueness has not visited for a while. “That’s retro.” Maybe. Retro to me comes from the 60’s and 70’s, within the memory span of at least some of the fashion public. Mr. Connick, Jr.’s era of musical comfort comes from the 30’s and 40’s. Not too many people can recall that musical epoch.

I like my electronic gadgets and gizmos. I like my Mac, my iPod and my iPhone. But most of my tastes in music are from fifty to seventy years ago. Almost twenty years ago Harry Connick, Jr. got the public’s OK on the matter. I only hope that my music fashion license hasn’t expired.

Credits: To Scott Joplin, for refining the ragtime style and helping to pave the way for Jazz. Thank you.