Connie Crothers

I always had a deep feeling to be one with the very minute I’m in.

Sometimes I sound like gravel and sometimes I sound like coffee and cream.

I went back and listened to the first three albums I made and tried to figure out what was special about them, why people keep going back to them. I think it was because I didn’t know what I was doing. I had no idea if they were going to play it on the radio or anything. All I did was write songs, so that’s what I got back to.

A great symphony is a man-made Mississippi down which we irresistibly flow from the instant of our leave-taking to a long forseen destination.

Music that is born complex is not inherently better or worse than music that is born simple.

Tomorrow you’ll wish you had practiced harder today.

The blues tells a story in itself. It can make you happy or give you a feeling to swing.

I have music inside me and I’m very lucky to be able to play music and that’s the way that I try to do it.

Three months. I was playing the organ for three months. It was a challenge for me in the beginning.

The true value of this music lies in an artist’s individual creativity and that unique process of expression which is Jazz.

Never play anything the same way twice.

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

I have to be a star like another man has to breathe.

I say this because it’s a good message to give to young talents who feel as I used to. You hear musicians playing with great fluidity and complete conception early on, and you don’t have that ability. I didn’t. I had to know what I was doing. And ultimately it turned out that these people weren’t able to carry their thing very far. I found myself being more attracted to artists who have developed through the years and become better and deeper musicians.I believe in things that are developed through hard work.

We’re here to have a ball.

First of all, I never strive for identity. That’s something that just has happened automatically as a result, I think, of just putting things together, tearing things apart and putting it together my own way, and somehow I guess the individual comes through eventually.