When Harry met ‘halo-halo’

You’ve got admire a performer who dares to step on a stage in Manila and casually kid the crowd, “You know, we love this place… but y’all don’t have pretty women.”

Waves of horrified gasps, followed by enthusiastic cheers from the Philippine International Convention Center as the crowd realized Mr. Harry Connick Jr. was only kidding. Joke lang.

No, Connick quickly amended it by saying, “Y’all have the biggest per capita number of beautiful women we’ve seen in any country.”

Much more applause.

Mr. Connick was working the room.

Backed by an 11-piece big band orchestra he just happened to drag along with him to Manila, Connick showed the Filipinos that he’s more than just the guy who sang on When Harry Met Sally.

Canny New Orleans performer that he is, Connick brushed up on his local dialect: “Salamat!” he kept chirping between songs, and told us about his halo-halo experience, caught up short by the corn and red beans (“You all have to decide whether this is dessert or dinner!”).

Oh, yes, and he did sing and play a lot of piano, too, between the Vegas-style crowd warming and routines.

Opening with a Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey? that was a bit off-tempo — the piano and rhythm section never quite synching on the frenzied number — Connick proceeded to set his own pace behind the piano stool, leading the big band (trumpet and sax sections, trombone, bass, drums) through a variety of old-time numbers, stuff from the Bayou, New Orleans blues and jazz that evoked his native city. Most of the music came from his tribute album to New Orleans, “Oh My NOLA,” including classic stuff from Allen Toussaint and Dr. John, reworked Carole King and Cajun-fried Hank Williams (Jambalaya [On the Bayou]).”

What you didn’t hear was stuff from his Grammy-winning music soundtrack to a certain big-hit rom-com starring Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan.

That’s okay, because Connick had Manila in the palm of his hand. His energy and connection with this country (though he’s only been in town a couple days) were obvious from the start. It was enough to make you ask, where’s Harry been all these years?

Connick, of course, is the son of a New Orleans district attorney who staked his claim on the local club scene with his precocious piano stylings (evoking Thelonious Monk, chiefly) and crooning voice steeped in Southern tradition. He made a big splash with his mostly-instrumental first albums but soon found much bigger fame doing retro arrangements of standards for Rob Reiner’s hit movie.

Some say it was a case of arrested development.

So what happened to Harry? The world happened to Harry. He got married (to Victoria’s Secret model Jill Goodacre), had a family and continued to do interesting, if eccentric, albums that extended his jazz concept (the memorably titled “Lofty’s Roach Souffle”) while veering away from the insta-croon success that had made him famous and marked him, prematurely, as a one-trick pony. That’s okay: a million Michael Bublés were hatching elsewhere, waiting to pick up his discarded mantle.

Then he did some funk-jazz albums that further alienated his earlier fans. Perverse? Maybe.

He also did quite a lot of movie acting (the last thing we saw him in was William Friedkin’s paranoid thriller, Bug) and was a familiar face on Will & Grace (which could explain the large gay turnout in the audience). All this made those who thought Connick would become the next Monk or whatever go “Hunh?”

But mostly, Connick was staying close to music and to New Orleans (though he lives in Connecticut with his family). He’s been working with variations of this big band for 18 years, developing an ever-changing repertoire of 200 songs. And he organized one of the biggest post-Katrina charity concerts, while donating the proceeds of the “Oh My NOLA” album to his birthplace.

So that brings Connick up to date, here in Manila, in a concert put on by MTV. His chugging workout on Workin’ in a Coal Mine brought the band into full-throttle mode, where they stayed throughout the show. He joked that he started out as a solo performer, just him and piano, gradually formed a quartet and then built up his orchestra, and would probably end up back to “just me and the piano, playing somewhere in 2037.” Standards like Hello Dolly, Iko Iko and Let Them Talk were revamped, paired against lengthy band workouts like Basin Street Blues, proving that Harry’s got game. Not just content to show off his Monk-ish skills, Connick trotted out his stride piano, boogie-woogie rolls and some lush jazz comping on All These People.

But he really sealed the deal by daring himself to eat balut onstage. And following through. First getting a compliant female from the audience to “instruct” him, Connick tapped open the egg (“I don’t even know what trimester you’re in”) and swallowed the soup. “That was really gross,” he said with a wince, and I could believe him. Unfortunately, no one instructed Connick to remove the hard pit at the center of the duck embryo before popping the whole thing in his mouth, so he was crunching on that for five minutes, washing it down with a Coke and being led around onstage like a befuddled Jerry Lewis by trumpeter Lucien Barbarin until settling back onto his piano stool … only to release a massive burp mid-song.

If nothing else, 20 years in the business has taught Connick how to entertain a crowd. He was dancing with band members — even doing a booty shake with Barbarin during one encore — and organizing an impromptu game of “balut baseball” (a sax player pitched several eggs into the crowd, always managing to hit the concrete overhang and coat the people below in the classy seats with duck guts).

When Connick told us Manila reminded him of New Orleans, we hoped that he didn’t mean post-Katrina, awash with wreckage and debris. He joked that the humidity was so heavy he “needed a couple extra cans of hair product.” And he started out wearing suit and tie and ended the night with rolled-up shirtsleeves, just another Basin Street entertainer, working the crowd for a living.