Creativity Quote by Ray Conniff

There is a quiet kind of ambition hiding in Conniff's breezy chain of "felt right". It frames musicianship less as career strategy than as social attunement: you show up, you listen, you jump in, you ride the groove until the room agrees. In a city that mythologizes hustle, he recasts hustle as immersion. Sitting in at "every club" is both a brag and a creed: real authority in music comes from being porous to other players, not from guarding your own brand.

The repetition is the point. "Because it felt right - and because it felt right" mimics the logic of jam sessions themselves, where the best justification for the next chorus is that the last one landed. He's describing feedback, not philosophy: musicians pushing air into a room, the room pushing back with movement, drinks, smiles. The subtext is that legitimacy is collective. If the dancers "felt it too", then the music has passed its only meaningful test.

Context matters: mid-century New York club culture was an ecosystem of cross-pollination, especially in jazz-adjacent scenes where a sit-in was both an audition and a conversation. Conniff, who later became synonymous with polished vocal arrangements and mass-market ease, is tracing that smoothness back to something messier and more democratic. He's staking a claim that accessibility isn't dilution; it's a learned skill forged in rooms where strangers decide in real time whether to lean in, sway, or tune out. The smile is the metric, and Conniff is savvy enough to treat it as serious.