This charming man

Q: Clive Davis knows how to produce hits. That’s what he does for a living. How did you find a balance between his pop sensibility and your own artistic integrity?

A: The vocals are non-negotiable — I’m’a sing ’em the way I sing ’em. And he never said, “I think you should sing like this.” A lot of times — like I did Close to You a little bit faster, and he told me it needed to be slower, and I was like, “Let me think about that.” ’Cause this is a guy who’s technically not a musician telling me, who is a musician, about tempo? We’re gonna fight about this – and we did! I’d go home, and I’d think about it.

My wife told me, she said: “You have no reason to be upset. You signed up for this! Clive came to you and asked if you wanted his help” – or not help, but asked if I wanted to collaborate – “and you said yes. What are you bitchin’ about? Just do it.”

(Sony Music Canada)

Q: Were there any tracks that posed specific challenges?

A: Considering the angst I went through, yeah, definitely. ’Cause there were a lot of times when we really butted heads. You know, you’re talking about two fairly big egos that were trying to get to the same place, but we didn’t know how to tell each other what it was. We weren’t speaking the same language. And I don’t – see, I don’t work like that. I’ll write a chart – an arrangement – and I don’t have proofreaders. I write it, it’s done, I record it, it’s over. That’s how I make records in three days.

With Clive, I’d present him with an arrangement. He’d say, “Try it this way.” So I’d go back and rewrite the arrangement. He’d say, “Try it this way.” I’d go back and rewrite the arrangement. I revisited these charts like five or six times. It took months to write! I don’t do that! I’ve never had somebody tell me which way to go, so it was really an unusual situation for me to be in. It forced me to go down a different road, which I just wouldn’t have gone down. But I love the way it came out. It was like, “Wow, OK, that’s cool!”

Q: What inspired the string arrangement on Mona Lisa?

A: Wow! Why would you ask me that? Why do you care about that?

Q: I grew up playing cello, so that’s part of it. But really, a lot of the time people use string arrangements as window dressing.

A: Oh my god! You should’ve heard the string arrangements before they were Davis-ized. But there’s something to that! He said, “I want you to be a singer.” ’Cause with a lot of my records, [my vocals] will be fighting with the strings, so this forced me to window dress sometimes when it was appropriate.

Q: Henry Mancini’s Moon River set the bar for gorgeous strings in this genre.

A: You know how hardcore that stuff is? You’re talking about a great composer and great players!

Q: And that sparked a legacy of shoddy imitations. But the strings you’ve put together on Mona Lisa evoke those old Mancini arrangements.

A: Wow, that means so much. Nobody ever asks me questions about the strings. I love writing for strings, especially cello, because you can basically do anything. Imagine being a composer – a conductor – and you’ve got four or six of the greatest cellists there are, and they get it. I work with them all the time, and they’re just great musicians. Like, Mona Lisa was one of the charts where I thought Clive would not like it. Because it has that [singing] “Brrrrrr! Dee-dee-dee!” and I figured he wouldn’t go for that, because he doesn’t like high strings. That’s just his personal take. Or Who Can I Turn To is another one, where I thought there was no way [he’d be into it], and he said, “Nah, I like it. We’re not trying to squelch your musical personality here, but we have to continue focusing on the vocals.” I have to respect him for that, but I just love string writing.

Q: Do you feel a need to interpret the legacy of Louisiana music in the post-Katrina era?

A: It’s funny. When I was there, like two days after the hurricane, some guy came up to me and said, “So, are you gonna do an album about this?” And I was like, “No!” I thought it was so vulgar – at least at that point in time. I didn’t say anything, but I’m thinking, “This is so much bigger than art.” Death or heartbreak or longing or any emotion that can be fruitful with an interpretation, sometimes for me, I feel like it’s bigger than all that – you know what I’m saying? I’ve never, like, run to the piano when my heart’s been broken.

Harry Connick, Jr., centre, performs during his release event for Your Songs in New York. (Larry Busacca/Getty Images)

Q: You’re obviously tapped into the New Orleans jazz scene. Do you feel like it’s possible to recover and rebuild that legacy?

A: Oh, absolutely. First of all, it hasn’t all physically been destroyed. A lot of it was. But you know, the spirit is stronger than anything material anyway. That’s why those people [whose families have] been there for nine generations move back to the same neighbourhood. Even the Ninth Ward, when there was 12 feet of water – they still moved back. It’s hard for people to understand that, especially in a place like Toronto, where there’s a lot of immigrants and transience.

New Orleans has more multigenerational families per capita than any other city in the United States. You’re talking about generations going back 200 years. And it’s an amazing thing, but you couple that with a sort of Caribbean feel. It almost feels like music isn’t something you go to see or hear, it’s something that comes to you. It’s everywhere. It’s in the streets. You hear it, you feel it, you smell it … the food, everything is like no other city in the world. I can’t even describe it to you. You have to actually go there, and that’s when you’re like, “Ahhh, I get it now.”

The good thing is that that cannot be destroyed. I’m not saying that like some optimist – I really mean it’s not goin’ anywhere.

Q: Is that why you started the Musicians’ Village project [which provides affordable housing to working artists], to try and prevent a cultural brain drain?

A: That’s why I started it. I mean, these guys were bringing in their gig books and showing how much they were working. They bent over backwards to do what they could. [Habitat for Humanity] wasn’t giving these houses away – I mean, these guys and gals built their own houses and put the sweat equity in, and they pay their mortgages every month. However, it provides them with a home, which is quite different from renting a place or any of that. Imagine being a little kid and coming home from school and not knowing if your house is there. You don’t know if you’re gonna have a place to live because your dad’s a musician, maybe [you have] a single mom or dad, maybe you’ve gotten booted out. That’s a terrible place to be. These people now, at least 80 families have homes.

Q: You studied at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts when you were a kid, and Ellis Marsalis was your mentor. As a parent now, you must have an investment in arts education funding.

A: Uh, I am not as involved in the arts education as I am in getting people places to live – you know what I’m saying? There’s people who know a lot … I’m not gonna sit here and pretend I can give out numbers about arts education. The school I went to, the New Orleans Centre for Creative Arts, was kind of a piece-of-crap building, clearly under-funded, but I learned everything in that school.

If you look at the people who came through that classroom, starting with Wynton and Branford, Donald Harris and Terrence Blanchard and me and Reginald Veal – the list just keeps going. There’s no coincidence there. Had I been brought up someplace else, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking right now.