A week after the sudden death of her saxophonist husband Jason Rae who died of a suspected accidental drug overdose, singer Corinne Bailey Rae has released a statement through her reps saying “Corinne Bailey Rae and her family have been touched by the huge amount of love and support that’s flooded in from all over the world, and that is really helping all of us cope at this terrible time. Corinne is also very grateful for the privacy she is being given and the respect that has been paid to herself and Jason.” My condolences go out to Corinne and the rest of her family.

“It’s exactly the same,” the singer-pianist said Wednesday at the Maison Bourbon, where more than 30 years ago he performed on piano with the Dixieland jazz band. “I remember the smell of Irish coffee in here. That’s what people liked to drink in here back then.”

Connick was elated to see the painting of a group of musicians marching through the French Quarter still hanging on the wall. He said he has a deep appreciation for much of what has remained intact in New Orleans since Katrina struck on Aug. 29, 2005, flooding 80 percent of his hometown.

Connick’s childhood home in the Lake view neighborhood was badly damaged by floodwater when the city’s levee system failed during Katrina. On Tuesday, he discovered the house had been demolished.

“It’s just an empty lot,” he said. “It’s sad because for me there’s a lot of sentimental value, but it’s good too because it means progress. It means that things are going to change.”

On Wednesday, the Maison Bourbon served as a gathering place for Connick, who turned 40 Tuesday, and a handful of residents from the Musicians Village — the project Connick launched with saxophonist Branford Marsalis after Hurricane Katrina to help displaced musicians.

Connick said the city’s recovery from Katrina has been painstakingly slow, but he is trying to stay positive.

“I try to focus on the good more than anything else, because there’s not much I can do about all the bad stuff,” he said. “The thing I think I can do better than anything else is keep the awareness in front of people and remind people how much work still needs to be done.”

Connick and members of Habitat for Humanity break ground Thursday on the multi-million-dollar Ellis Marsalis Music Center, named for the jazz pianist and patriarch of the Marsalis family. The center will include a performance hall and practice rooms and serve as a place for musicians of different ages and genres to mingle.

“It will ensure there will be a physical place where young musicians can go to learn from older musicians,” Connick said.

“I can see why someone may want to make an album that goes down easy and why a record company would want to put it out because it’s a quick way to make a sale,” said Hornsby, who makes his all-instrumental jazz debut with “Camp Meeting,” due August 7 via Legacy.

“But my record is just the opposite. I have two of the most in-demand jazz artists, Christian McBride on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums, playing with me, and we go into plenty of dissonant, stark, angular sonic places,” he said. “This is not casual jazz playing; it’s been something I’ve been wanting to do for years.”

The genesis of “Camp Meeting” stretches back to Hornsby’s jazz studies at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and the University of Miami. But after graduation he gravitated to the songwriter camp as a pianist/vocalist, even though his earliest pop hits, among them “The Way It Is” and “The Valley Road,” featured jazz-informed piano breaks. He has also worked through the years with such top-tier jazz artists as Pat Metheny, Branford Marsalis and Wayne Shorter.

After encounters in recent years with Metheny and DeJohnette, who each encouraged him to take the jazz plunge, Hornsby embraced the harmonic jazz language that he “hadn’t spoken for years,” he said. “I was no longer fluent. I knew I had to go into the woodshed.”

The refresher course paid off. Hornsby not only demonstrates his jazz prowess on “Camp Meeting,” but also conjures up that rare alchemy with his rhythm team as they contemporize tunes by Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett, Thelonious Monk (a reharmonized, rumba-flavored “Straight, No Chaser”) and Bud Powell (including a hip-hop-spiced take on “Celia”). There’s also a never-released Ornette Coleman track, “Questions and Answers,” that the iconoclastic saxophonist played for Hornsby years ago.

The CD was recorded in April 2006. Given their hectic schedules, the threesome’s next meeting was May 26 at the B.B. King club in New York, to perform a benefit show for the jazz-in-schools organization Jazz Reach.

Backstage at the show, DeJohnette said, “Bruce doesn’t lose himself. He approaches jazz with his own sensibility.” McBride was likewise impressed and joked, “But I worry about him. I hope he doesn’t get too good and make jazz his thing.”

Hornsby laughed when told of these remarks. “Rest assured,” he said, “I love writing songs and it’s great fun to sing.”