According to Steve Khan, his father, lyricist Sammy Cahn, "loved to hear of any and all versions of his songs". Thus Khan grew up in a house with music. He took piano lessons as a child and played drums for the surf rock band the Chantays. The band's guitarist exposed him to the albums Tough Talk by The Crusaders and Movin' Wes by Wes Montgomery. In his late teens he quit the drums and started playing guitar. He was a member of the R&B band Friends of Distinction, recorded with keyboardist Phil Moore, then played on the albumBullitt by Wilton Felder. Despite his father's advice to avoid a career in the music business, he graduated from UCLA with a degree in music compositionand theory. In the early 1970s, he performed in an acoustic guitar duo with Larry Coryell and was a member of the Brecker Brothers band. As a session musician, he appeared on albums by Ashford & Simpson, Rupert Holmes, Billy Joel, and Steely Dan. He was signed to Columbia Records through the efforts of Bobby Colomby and Bob James. On his first three albums Tightrope, The Blue Man, and Arrows, he was trying "to single-handledly keep alive the sound of the original Brecker Brothers band." His next album was Evidence, which contained an eighteen-minute medley of songs by Thelonious Monk. In 1977, he toured with the CBS Jazz All-Stars which included Billy Cobham, Tom Scott, and Alphonso Johnson, and then led the ground-breaking band called Eyewitness that featured musicians: Steve Jordan, Anthony Jackson and Manolo Badrena. In 1986, he toured as part of Joe Zawinul's Weather Update. From 1999 through 2002, he co-led the Caribbean Jazz Project alongside Dave Samuels and Dave Valentín. From the 1980s through to the present, he has become the foremost proponent of the guitar in Latin Jazz. With the releases of Parting Shot, Subtext, and Backlog, he has created what the role of the guitar could be in Latin jazz. His style integrates angular single-note lines with chordal punctuations, reminiscent of jazz pianists like McCoy Tyner and Chick Corea. Arriving in New York at the dawn of the '70s, he came to form a part of the '2nd Wave' of Fusion guitarists that included John Abercrombie and Ralph Towner, and later arrivals John Scofield and Bill Connors. Over the course of a long career, he is now recognized for his innovations in the world of Latin Jazz, while firmly establishing himself to many as journalist Antonio Gandía described him in his cover story interview for "MÚSICO PRO" as 'the voice of Latin Jazz guitar'. AllAboutJazz.com's John Kelman sees him as "one of the great interpreters of the compositions of Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman." His album covers are notable for featuring the artwork of Jean-Michel Folon, and more recently, Michel Granger.
