Connie Crothers, May 2, 1941 – August 13 2016, was a jazz pianist. Before becoming a student of LennieTristano, she majored at the University of California Berkeley in music. Crothers started studying the classical or “European” piano at age nine and then went on to majoring in composition at University of California at Berkeley. Her teachers at Berkeley emphasized “compositional rigor” and “procedure, structure”, which was not what Crothers liked. She became the President of Jazz Foundation, which was established in his honor after Lennie Tristano’s death in November 1978. Her collaborations with Max Roach, including the album Swish, are also well-known. She was a leader of a quartet that included Roger Mancuso and Richard Tabnik. Crothers was diagnosed with cancer in August 2016.
