Dedicated to NOLA

A place called NOLA – New Orleans, La. – has inspired many musicians, and Harry Connick Jr. has felt its call since birth.

He is, after all, the son of a New Orleans district attorney. He played his first gig at age 5 in a club there. Like many New Orleans musicians, he was both devastated and moved by the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe.

That’s why Connick’s new tour, which arrives Tuesday at the INB Performing Arts Center, is titled the “My New Orleans Tour 2007.”

His new CD, “Oh, My NOLA,” contains such New Orleans classics as “Working in the Coal Mine,” “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey?” and “Jambalaya (On the Bayou).”

In the liner notes, Connick describes the styles he mixed into this album:

“Jazz, gospel, brass band, rhythm and blues, country, funk … these aren’t all the styles played in the Crescent City, but they’re the ones I wanted to play around with here.”

He explains some of his feelings toward his city and its musicians in the notes to his own composition, “Do Dat Thing.”

“New Orleans is a city of paradox,” writes Connick. “Sin, salvation, sex, sanctification, so intertwined yet so separate. The blurred lines from the dark blue of Mardi Gras night to the periwinkle of Ash Wednesday morning.”

As for the title phrase, “Do Dat Thing,” it’s New Orleans musical shorthand for what other people might call, let’s say, cookin’.

“In New Orleans, you just gotta know how to do it – all of the musicians I ever played with could do it,” Connick writes. “A lot of those guys and gals I played with have since died, but they could all do it. I named a few of them on this recording – the ones I knew, who have all passed away, who taught me how to do dat thing.”

Another Connick composition, titled “All These People,” is about those left stranded at the Convention Center in the Katrina aftermath.

It includes the line, “Well, the first two people we saw left the way we came,” which refers to two dead bodies Connick saw at the Convention Center.

Another song by Allen Toussaint, a New Orleans legend and one of Connick’s “all-time heroes,” expresses the more optimistic spirit of post-Katrina New Orleans with the title “Yes We Can Can.”

“That should be the theme song of our great city,” writes Connick.

On the same day in January that “Oh My NOLA” came out, Connick simultaneously released another New Orleans-themed CD, “Chanson Du Vieux Carre” – his third in the Marsalis Music label’s series “Connick on Piano.”

The instrumental album showcases Connick’s piano talents, as well as his skills as an arranger. It features a big band made of New Orleans musicians.

A portion of the royalties from both CDs will benefit New Orleans Habitat Musicians’ Village, to provide affordable housing in the city’s Upper Ninth Ward for displaced musicians and other residents.

Some people still know Connick mainly from the Sinatra-like stylings that first brought him to prominence in 1989’s “When Harry Met Sally” soundtrack.

They’ll be in for a surprise when he and his big band take the stage in Spokane. They’ll hear a Connick who is just as at home singing Toussaint-style R&B, Hank Williams country, Hoagy Carmichael’s classic “Lazy Bones” and a Satchmo-influenced “Hello Dolly!”

Call it a Connick gumbo.