Brian McKnight

My fans are the best in the world! They’ve grown up with me and stayed with me through this entire journey.

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.

Whenever I fill out the job description I put ‘songwriter’, never ‘singer’ or ‘artist.’ Singers come and go.

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

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

I think when my brother (Claude who founded vocal sextet Take Six) got his deal and I saw him on the Grammys that was when I said, ‘oh, you know what? If he can do it then maybe I can do too’ and that’s when I really focused on trying to make it in this business.

Nobody has ever been able to define Jazz satisfactorily. This is probably because anyone who was capable of doing so never really wanted to, knowing how much you would have to leave out of the definition.

I haven’t got a great jazz band and I don’t want one. Some of the critics, Down Beat’s among them, point their fingers at us and charge us with forsaking real jazz . . . It’s all in what you define as ‘real jazz.’ It happens that to our ears harmony comes first. A dozen colored bands have a better beat than mine. Our band stresses harmony.

I did go through a trial-and-error period where I tried out lots of different guitars, but within a couple of years I was right back to the Les Paul. From that point it’s stayed with me ever since. I have other guitars—and I love a lot of them—but I’m most at home on a Les Paul. It’s interesting: most of the time I would even rather make a Les Paul do the things those other guitars do. From the get-go, the Les Paul spoke to me.

When I got started in New York, if you were different from Miles and Dizzy it was very difficult.

Just because I’m playing Jazz I don’t forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through Jazz.

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

You’ve got to be willing to put stuff on the line, otherwise it doesn’t have much meaning.

That’s a great thing about jazz. We leave it a little space so that we have the opportunity to go where the moment takes us

There’s only two types of music. The stuff you can write down and the stuff you can’t. The stuff that you can’t write down is Jazz. Everything else is Polka.

It became a kind of a game, to remember the things that had happened five minutes ago. I would start making notes about the things I was doing, on an instrument that was foreign to me, the guitar, so it was just a fun way of doing cognitive therapy. I was none the wiser to it until I began to improve and my ability to speak began to come back.

Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking… The new inventive phrases we make up to describe things – all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play.

All I play is truth and emotion.

My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.

Jazz never ends… it just continues.

My role in society, or any artist or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.