How great they art . . .

HOWARD Morrison Junior is no stranger to the stage — his father was one of New Zealand’s most famous entertainers and he has been involved in kapa haka for as long as he can remember.
But when Morrison Jnr in 1990 established a singing quartet similar to the one with which his father made his name, it lasted for just four months.
“Dad told me in no uncertain terms that he was not ready to retire and that was the end of that,” he laughs.
Sir Howard Morrison Snr (OBE) was never really ready to retire. In the months before he died of a heart condition in September 2009, the 74-year-old staged a major concert, To Sir With Love, at hometown venue The Rotorua Convention Centre.
Even the week before he was still singing, unable to resist taking up the microphone during a family trip to Rarotonga.
So when Morrison Jnr decided to launch a musical tribute on the first anniversary of his father’s death, he had to do so with care.
During the rehearsal period his mother Lady Kuia Morrison acted as “sheriff”, sharing the knowledge she had accumulated in the years since her husband in the 1950s started his career with The Howard Morrison Quartet.
And Morrison Jnr made sure he had the right artists on board to help him make up the freshly-minted Howard Morrison Jnr Trio.
There was himself, of course. Then he added towering singer Russell Harrison, who had acted as a backing vocalist for Sir Howard for so long that he was considered a whangai (adopted) son. And the trio was rounded out with the operatic voice of Chris Powley who, Morrison Jnr says, has a style “that is practically cloned on dad’s performances”.
There would have been a fourth, he adds, “but I couldn’t find another fella who was good looking enough”. So it was a trio that made its debut performance the night after Sir Howard’s unveiling on October 2, 2010.
But what was supposed to be a one-off tribute performance has snowballed.
The Trio has since performed their How Great Thou Art show to audiences both in New Zealand and overseas.
Then, this month, they launched a 38-date tour that started up north last week and over the next two months takes them steadily south, including next Wednesday’s stop-off in Gisborne.
The tour marks a big career shift for Morrison Jnr.
Once he realised how popular the trio was becoming, he in June announced that he was stepping down as frontman for Maori Television show Hunting Aotearoa, which he had presented for seven seasons.
The show’s makers say they will miss him . . . “Howie brought his larger-than-life and charismatic humour to the programme . . . he is, naturally, a great entertainer and an accomplished performer”, said producer Piripi Curtis.
And Morrison Jnr says he will miss the people he came across during the years he worked on the show.
“I met a lot of nice people . . . hell of a nice people,” he says. “They were all there at my dad’s funeral, turning up with chilly bins of kai they had caught, from venison to crayfish. They are people who have become friends for life.”
But there are also upsides to his career change. For one thing, he inherited from his dad a passion for musical performance and is welcoming the opportunity to entertain in a way that doesn’t involve roaming isolated hill country for 16 hours a day. For another, he gets to wear a flash suit “so I can put my Swanni away for the time being”.
Morrison Jnr says that, much like his father’s quartet, the new trio combines comedy (“I wouldn’t be a Morrison if I didn’t have a lot of humour”) with music, devoting the first half of the show to their own favourites — like those by artists Engelbert Humperdinck and Tom Jones — while part two focuses on Quartet hits from The Battle Of The Waikato to My Old Man’s An All Black.
He won’t be drawn on which member of the trio is the best singer — though he does break into a dramatic solo version of How Great Thou Art to try to fix the odds in his favour.
“I suppose you could say that Russell is very Luther Vandross-i, Chris is more operatic and I am somewhere in the middle,” he says.
“But when it’s time to blend it all together we all leave our egos behind . . . it’s all about harmony.”
Which is why, he believes, the Trio is already getting a good response on tour.
“The feedback we are getting is that no one really sings those kinds of songs any more, that there is nothing out there for people who love to listen to this kind of music,” he says. “It’s all about having a lot of fun together and giving the audience the best we can. It’s just a lot of fun with an extra bit of couth.” ■ The Howard Morrison Jnr Trio performs at Gisborne’s War Memorial Theatre next Wednesday, October 5 (7pm). Tickets at Stephen’s PhotoPlus.