Congas Quotes

Chano Pozo created the role of the conga soloist in the modern band, somewhat th way Coleman Hawkins created the solo tenor sax.

I think Ross Noble is the only person that I've seen really storm a stand-up slot at a festival, and that was when he led 3,000 people on a conga out of the tent and across the entire site to a vegetarian food truck.

I think people who basically do one thing like Eric Clapton is great. But I've always enjoyed playing different kinds of music and playing with different kinds of musicians because I find that really interesting, like learning and working with Kip Hanrahan. There's a great conga player called Milton Cardona and he taught me a lot of the nuances, he's a Santeria Priest and so he knows his onions as it were.

I started out by myself, but it eventually turned into a trio by the mid-'60s - a conga drum and another guitarist. And that's been mostly what I've worked with most of the time.

My Conga people [fans] will find me anywhere I go.

Unseen University was much bigger on the inside. Thousands of years as the leading establishment of practical magic in a world where dimensions were largely a matter of chance in any case had left it bulging in places where it shouldn't have places. There were rooms containing rooms which, if you entered them, turned out to contain the room you'd started with, which can be a problem if you are in a conga line.

The shortest distance between two idiots is a conga line.

I think the way I play the guitar is very percussive. I play a lot of rhythm chops as though I were playing congas or something.

For the rest of my life, the one song that people will remember -- regardless -- is "Conga" . . . I never get tired of singing it. It never gets old for me.

As a fan, I'm distraught, but as a cartoonist looking at new vacant spaces in 2400 newspapers, well, behind me, my cats are dancing a conga line.

When we live up to our Constitution, let's form a Conga line around the Capitol and bungee jump off the dome.

Nature is more like a seesaw than a crystal, a never-ending conga line of bold moves and corrections.

There was always music in our home. My mom and my dad loved music. I remember when we were kids we would have these great parties at the house with congas and bongos and African drums, and it was amazing. It wasn't until years later that I found out that they were actually Black Panther meetings.

I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as "Mon" in three different nations. I have seen 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer-enhanced. I have (very briefly) joined a conga line.

When I went to do "Carson" that night, they wanted us to do two songs, but we were a brand new band. "Conga" hadn't even hit the top 10 yet. They go, "Do you think you could do something that people know, because we want you to do a second song, but not two originals, because we don't want to lose the audience, just in case."

The basic success of the conga came from ...that basic principle of African music and dance: everybody participates. The conga eradicated the distinction between performer and audience, broke down the wall of the proscenium.