{"id":860379,"date":"2026-09-25T16:54:16","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T16:54:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/860379\/"},"modified":"2026-09-25T16:54:16","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T16:54:16","slug":"harry-connick-jr-babe-book-excerpt-in-tribute-to-his-late-mother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/860379\/","title":{"rendered":"Harry Connick Jr. ‘Babe’ Book Excerpt, In Tribute to His Late Mother"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tLong before Harry Connick Jr.<\/a> was a Grammy-winning singer\/pianist, his mother, Anita-Francis Livingston Connick \u2014 who died when Harry was just 13 \u2014 dreamed of her prodigiously talented son one day playing Carnegie Hall. This past spring, on what would have been Anita-Francis\u2019 100th birthday, Connick made his late mom\u2019s dream come true, playing three nights at the iconic New York concert hall with a three-part orchestral work that traces her life story from New York to Morocco and finally to their home of New Orleans.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn Friday (Sept. 25), Connick released Babe: Elaboratio<\/a>, a recording of that orchestral work \u2014 written, arranged and produced entirely by Connick \u2014 made in Melbourne, Australia\u2019s Iwaki Auditorium with 70-plus musicians from Orchestra Victoria and the Harry Connick Jr. Big Band, conducted by Jessica Gethin.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn further homage, Connick will release the book Babe: Elaboratio A Tribute to My Mother<\/a> next week via Harper Celebrate that includes personal photography and delves deeper into how his mother (lovingly nicknamed \u201cBabe\u201d) shaped his life and artistry. Below, Billboard has an exclusive excerpt from the book \u2014 out Sept. 29 \u2014 that sets up Anita-Francis\u2019 NYC beginnings and how her loss weighed on Connick\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

\n\tBabe: Elaboratio\u00a0is music for big band and orchestra that I wrote for my mother, Anita-Francis Livingston Connick, in honor of the one hundredth anniversary of her birth, for a performance given at Carnegie Hall in New York City on May 22, 2026. \u2026<\/p>\n

\n\tMy mother\u2019s ancestors were Ashkenazi Jews and \u2026 moved from Europe to New York City sometime in the early 1900s. \u2026 [My grandparents,] two young Jews, a Russian man and a Hungarian woman, making a home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, changing their last name from Levy to Livingston so they wouldn\u2019t seem \u201ctoo Jewish,\u201d having six children in the throes of the Great Depression. \u2026<\/p>\n

\n\tI only knew her for a short time, as she died when I was thirteen, but those years gave me infinite joy and strength.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThere is only one positive that came from losing my dear mother at that time in my life, and that is to say that she \u2026 well, as I type this, I\u2019ve changed my mind. There is no positive. I thought that maybe, as I\u2019m now fifty-seven, I\u2019d be able to see her death from a different perspective, and I certainly do. I\u2019m able to freely talk about it now, something I was unable to do for years, decades. But to attempt to find a positive in that indescribable loss is something I, an artist who spends every moment trying to define the undefinable, will never be able to do. \u2026<\/p>\n

\n\tFor\u00a0Babe: Elaboratio,\u00a0I was able to write whatever I heard in my head exactly how I heard it, without having to translate it to anyone else, allowing me to accomplish something I wanted to do: musically and personally articulate a delicate, complex, deeply profound and emotional sentiment. This composition describes my feelings much more effectively than any words I could string together over dinner \u2013 not that I\u2019d be so presumptuous to assume that anyone would sit down and listen to the whole thing as an alternative to answering a simple question of \u201cWhat was your mom like?\u201d But now I have an answer. This music allows me to show people things about myself that I\u2019ve never been able to say before. I\u2019ve internalized my mom, so now my thoughts can float in the air for people to hear, see, and imagine, to hold in their hands and touch. That\u2019s about as close as I can get to letting those who are interested understand the perfect blessing that was the time I had with my mom.<\/p>\n

\n\t-Babe: Elaboratio A Tribute to My Mother is out Sept. 29 via Harper Celebrate<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Long before Harry Connick Jr. was a Grammy-winning singer\/pianist, his mother, Anita-Francis Livingston Connick \u2014 who died when…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":860380,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[363147,223,88,9891,498],"class_list":["post-860379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-billboard-book-club","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-jazz","tag-music-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=860379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860379\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/860380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=860379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=860379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=860379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}