OTTAWA - Despite overcast skies, the Ottawa International Jazz Festival was hoping to see stars. Well, last night, it delivered one of jazz's biggest luminaries, American crooner Harry Connick Jr.

After all, the 37-year-old band leader and sometime movie and TV star from New Orleans knows how to entertain a crowd, even one with hardcore jazz purists looking for a musical buzz mixed with those just looking for a good time.

It was an amazing balancing act of jazz and jokes. I don't know why Connick doesn't have his own television variety series like the venerable Ed Sullivan's Sunday-night showcase.

Strike one for festival organizers, who turned their 25th opening night into one of the biggest, and perhaps best, launching parties in the festival's history.

And the 10,000 who jammed Confederation Park proved a happy distraction for festival organizers, who begged the fans to move their blankets and lawn chairs to make room for others.

The claustrophobic seating was partly due to the festival's new staging, a massive black proscenium complete with live widescreen television broadcast. For the fans up front, the new configuration is a little tighter up front, but more intimate further back.

As daunting as the new staging is, it's a huge, visible sign that the festival is ready to grow even bigger and user-friendly over the next 25 years.

Accompanied by the National Arts Centre Orchestra, conducted by Jack Everly, and Connick's seven-piece band, Harry opened the show with Sinatra's classic More that sounded just as sweet as diamonds on velvet. Sounding smooth and warm, Connick followed that up with another Sinatra standard For Once In My Life at the grand.

Whether singing or joking with the band and the fans, Connick proved to be effortlessly easy to like, turning on the charm at every turn while flirting during a seductive version of Fred Astaire's Change Partners that was wrapped in gorgeous strings and decorated with Ned Goold's sassy sax. Second sax Jimmy Greene swooned on a cover of Fats Domino's Blue Heaven enough for Connick to comment, "You are one sexy sax player."

Having won over the fans with familiar standards and his smooth Southern charm, Connick spent much of the second hour getting down at the keyboard and riffing off his excellent band, perhaps in anticipation of tonight's two gigs with sax-player Branford Marsalis at the National Library and Archives.

Proving downright dangerous at the keyboard, Connick gave his band a quick break midway while he performed a dazzling solo piano improvisation on Sweet Georgia Brown.

For jazz aficionados, it was the start of a surprisingly soulful tribute to Connick's improvisational abilities. It's been 15 years since his multi-platinum breakthrough When Harry Met Sally album put Connick on jazz music's A-list. Still, he has been incredibly popular acting in the sitcom Will and Grace and in movies such as Independence Day that people who don't know his fabled past are surprised by Connick's level of musicianship.

Well, last night, they found out in a hurry.

Connick and his band delighted fans with a giddy front-line chorus of Love Belongs To Me.

But Sinatra's shadow never left the stage for long. At least when Everly and the NAC Orchestra started playing. Connick wrapped intermezzo of musical fireworks with a lush cover of Where or When. Equally smooth was a cover of Ray Charles' classic You Don't Know Me.

He followed that with a hilarious celebrity endorsement of Terry's Lemonade that had the fans doubled over laughing.

Even the hardcore jazz fans.

SUN RATING: 5 out of 5