Brian Stokes Mitchell

When you have a community that's strong in the arts, it brings all sorts of attention and different businesses into the community.

My family's very, very mixed. I am, I guess, a kind of melting pot in a person.

To me, a theater is a kind of a sacred space. It needs a kind of ceremony, like what happens when you consecrate a church.

Music, for me, is the most sacred of the arts. I say that because music communicates in a way that no other art form can. All great art has a spirit that we recognize and appreciate, but music goes directly to your heart.

You lose more than you win in life, and that's OK. That's the nature of life.

People in the performing arts have a lot of other skills they don't realize they can utilize, and part of what the Actors Fund program is there to do is wake their head up to realize there are other things they can do.

I think the problem is when people hear 'arts education,' they think, 'I don't want my son to be some painter that's going to be hanging in some museum after he dies. I don't want my daughter to be a struggling artist making no money.' People don't realize it's more than that. It's beautiful. It brings beauty to our lives.

The Actors Fund is a human services organization, so our focus has been on caring for the entire human as opposed to dealing with the disease.

One of the interesting things an artist does is they keep rediscovering things, whether it's a jazz piece or a role you've done for 3,000 performances or a song you're singing for the 3,000th time. My job is to find that spark that keeps it fresh and alive.

I've been really fortunate that my concert career has taken off hugely. I can make a living. I enjoy performing in front of a live audience, and I can do something different every time. Sometimes I'm with a quartet, sometimes I'm solo, sometimes with a symphony, and I get to go to different cities and meet different people.

I was raised on jazz. My father, from the time I was born, used to get up early on Saturdays and Sundays and put on Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Kenny Burrell, Sarah Vaughn, John Coltrane - all these great, classic albums.

Each time I have performed in Utah, I had a great time, and the audiences seem to enjoy what I do. The audiences are very warm and very appreciative.