Harry Connick Jr. Trio’s “Lonely Side” just came up on iTunes– for the first time in over two years. It’s funny how the random shuffle will keep tracks from playing for a long time, but it’s always pleasant when you hear a song that you haven’t heard in a long time.

Lofty’s Roach Souffle , which was the one album that Harry Connick Jr. released with his trio, was the soundtrack to Soap, Scents & Seduction, a live, improvised soap opera that I worked on in 1990. Sharon Elder was the guiding force behind the show, which was a ridiculous send-up of the usual tacky soap opera crap, set in a soap factory. I think, for the life of me, I will never forget Helen Hagan saying the line, “Exfoliating scrub? Mr. Johnson, what kind of girl do you think I am?”

Sharon was one of the first people other than Larry Long who believed that I really had a place doing improv. I was a goofy-looking, 15-year-old kid at the time, which I think is all anyone else saw, but Sharon and Larry really bent over backwards to make me feel like I wasn’t wasting my time. She also set me up with a couple of jobs for different things, like taking photos of people in costume at Harnett County’s Project Graduation in 1991.

I’ve tried a number of times over the years to find a jazz trio that sounded anything like that one Connick album. There aren’t a ton of piano-bass-drums albums that I can find, particularly with my unrefined palate for jazz. Pandora didn’t help me much, but that may be due to the fact that I can’t use any of the Lofty’s Roach Souffle songs as a starting point– they’re not listed anywhere, even though a bunch of Connick’s vocal stuff is (not interested).