Brian McKnight

There’s no substitute to being successful on an actual chart.

Stevie didn’t use the technology to drive the song. He used it to enhance. I use the tools to further my work, I don’t use my work to further the tools.

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.

Lionel Richie told me forget about the critics. But if you come back with hit after hit, you don’t have to worry about anything.

Back in college, when I got kicked out of school, I was still in school, I’d just written the song that got me my record deal. If I hadn’t gotten kicked out of school I wouldn’t be where I am now. Three months after that, I got my record deal and the rest is history.

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

Technique is the ability to translate your ideas into sound through your instrument. This is a comprehensive technique . . . a feeling for the keyboard that will allow you to transfer any emotional utterance into it. What has to happen is that you develop a comprehensive technique and then say, forget that. I’m just going to be expressive through the piano.

The first time I went to Paris, it just felt like I was home. I didn’t question it.

There are a million good tunes.

Sometimes it’s to your advantage for people to think you’re crazy.

A drummer has to be kind-hearted.

Everybody that you could name would join in our audiences from, Laguardia on down. Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.

There are no natural barriers. It’s all music.

Last time I saw Count Basie, he was in a wheelchair. They wheeled him up onto the stage, he sits down at the piano, and he gives the downbeat, and that band played like they were in heaven. And right in the middle, the band cuts. He had to take one hand and put the other on it, and he comes down with one note. And it was the greatest note I ever heard in my life.

Get around, be on the scene, play it clean, be seen, be keen and be over eighteen.

You don’t know what you like, you like what you know. In order to know what you like, you have to know everything.

It takes an intelligent ear to listen to Jazz.

Music is interior decoration.

I wanna hear myself everywhere

To compose music, all you need to do is remember a tune that no one else has thought of.

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.