Brian McKnight

I’ve been a jazz artist playing pop and R&B my entire career.

I am at my core a singer/songwriter a la James Taylor or a la Billy Joel. It’s not that I don’t want to work with people, but I do just love doing my own thing.

In my family on my mother’s side we’re all church musicians first so I don’t remember a time when we weren’t doing something musical. My brothers and I sang in a little quartet, my aunts and uncles sang and my grandfather was a minister of music in our church, so walking and talking was like doing music for us.

I don’t care how small the game. I want to win.

I tend to lean on the side of pessimism and I wish I could be more optimistic. I wish I could be better at taking things for what they are – not analyzing them – but just going about my life.

I decided I am not going to say things I do not mean anymore.

It’s important to find your own voice and do something of your own.

I’m not much on gimmicks. I never have been because they don’t last.

There is a time where you’re beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than your usual ideas.

Art [Blakey] would take young people with a potential and help them develop a voice as a player and as a writer.

We recorded to document ourselves, not to sell a lot of records.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

I gave it my absolute everything I had in that howl at the start of the song. And then B. B. King opened up his mouth and I felt like a girl. We had learned and absorbed, but the more we tried to be like B.B., the less convincing we were.

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 heard Mr. Wild Bill Davis. I heard him play in 1930 and he told me that it would take me fifteen years just to learn the pedals, the pedals of the organ and I got mad.

Wes Montgomery played impossible things on the guitar because it was never pointed out to him that they were impossible.

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there’s no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

A musician starting out today should get a great teacher and learn all there is to know about the instrument.

It is evidently known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of Jazz and I, myself, happened to be the creator in the year 1902.

Actually, I think the more Ben [Taylor] sings, the less like James he sounds.

Jazz is one of the best things that you can find in your life, it can always be your friend.