Brian McKnight

When it’s your chance to step up to the plate, just hit it out of the park, and everybody will forget about everything that came before.

Jazz is about improvisation and the moment in time, doing it this way now and you’ll never do it this way twice.

When the label came to me to say, ‘would you like to do another record,’ I said, ‘Well I got these sixteen songs sitting here, so let’s do it.’ And that was pretty much it… I never stopped writing, it’s just the way that the business is now; you just try to find a different model.

I thought that true love was a just fairytale but I have it and it’s pretty amazing.

I watch my contemporaries, and they love to live in the studio and I don’t. I have a life. I treat it as a 9-to-5. I try to create something new every day, and then I get on with my life.

I kinda went back to that period between ’88 and ’94 where I felt like I was the most creative, without being hindered by powers that be. I was no longer going to try to hinder myself to what I thought was going to be on the radio.

Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world’s great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province… Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.

Your accompanist has a lot to do with how you sing, so experiment and choose your partner wisely.

I never believed in a set routine. It should depend on how you feel, because you play what you feel.

The way I feel today, as long as my health is good and I can handle myself well and people still come to my concerts, still buy my CDs, I’ll keep playing until I feel like I can’t.

The audience, they’re not professionals. They just love music. It isn’t necessary to play over their heads to be admired.

I started playing piano when I was 6. And I knew that wanted to be involved in that form of expression, whether it was through music, or acting, or dancing, or painting, or writing.

Excessive reverence for the romantic illusion of original thought is the most fraudulent and destructive element in Jazz education.

Even if people don’t understand the language that you’re singing in, they still know good music when they hear it.

There’s only one thing that everyone in this world has in common: whether you want to love somebody and you want to be loved in return.

We usually never got out of there before four or five o’clock in the morning. Every morning. So it was rough.

Vocalists must study music and know everything an instrumentalist needs to know.

When rock came in, people didn’t know what to do. Even Sinatra, he didn’t know what to do. The music was changing. And it’s changing now.

Whenever I’m in Kansas City, I think back to all the jazz-blues greats who played the blues here – like Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Jay McShann. I watched those guys jam in different places and heard a lot of things – but I couldn’t do what they did. They were too good.

Music gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and charm and gaiety to life.

Blues is to Jazz what yeast is to bread; without it, it’s flat.