Brian McKnight

I’ve worked with jazz artists, country artists, classical artists, pop artists. I never wanted there to be categories, because when I was a kid there weren’t.

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

I am just like all the jerks and idiots you know. I am just a guy that watches sports all day.

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’m not worried about legacy. I don’t even know what that actually means. I don’t think anyone knows. I hope at some point in my career when my name is mentioned, someone will say “Oh yeah he has a good song!” I’d be happy with that.

I was probably six years old when I first sang before an audience.

As far back as I can remember, singing was in my blood. My parents loved music, and I loved to sing. I was scatting at an early age.

Jazz music is the power of now.

I have a deep respect for harmony, melodic patterns and form.

When you are so strongly drawn to music, you can’t ‘not’ be a musician.

I always liked the steel guitar. I also love the guys that play the bottleneck. But I could never do it; I never made it do what I want. So every time I would pick up the guitar, I’d shake my hand and trill it a bit. For some strange reason my ears would say to me that sounds similar to what those guys were doing. I can’t pick up the guitar now without doing it. So that’s how I got into making my sound. It was nothing pretty. Just trying to please myself. I heard that sound.

Instrumental music can spread the international language.

Records used to be documents, but now record companies want product.

Music should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It’s easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed. That’s the real mission of art. The artist has to find something within himself that’s universal and which he can put into terms that are communicable to other people. The magic of it is that art can communicate to a person without his realizing it.

Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe I’m honest.

I think I love it more as I get older because I keep getting better on drums, vibes and piano.

Music’s been around a long time, and there’s going to be music long after Ray Charles is dead. I just want to make my mark, leave something musically good behind. If it’s a big record, that’s the frosting on the cake, but music’s the main meal.

Keep searching for that sound you hear in your head until it becomes a reality.

I fell in love with Jazz when I was 12 listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of Jazz in New York on the radio.

I was walking down the street, and I saw a sewer digger on his lunch hour open his lunch pail, dig out a harmonica, knock out the cracker crumbs, and play a bunch of tunes on it. I was fascinated by that harmonica, so I stared the guy out of it. I just stared at him. He said, ‘Here, kid, take it. Get out of here.’

[on B. B. King] Very seldom does he talks about the way he play, man. He always wanna talk about young women. And I fuss at him sometimes, I say, ‘Man I wanna know what did you do here!’