Art & Creativity Quote by Rick Derringer

Rick Derringer’s line lands with the breezy bluntness of a guitarist who’s spent years being filed under “riff guy” and felt the drawer start to stick. “Grown-up music” isn’t a technical description; it’s a social one. He’s talking about status, about escaping a reputation built in the youth-market churn of rock hits and guitar-hero flash. Jazz functions here as shorthand for credibility: not just different chords, but a different audience, a different kind of listening, a different kind of respect.

The subtext is both aspiration and self-defense. Derringer isn’t disowning rock so much as pushing back against the idea that rock is permanently adolescent. Calling jazz “grown-up” borrows a common cultural hierarchy where complexity equals maturity and improvisation equals intelligence. It’s a familiar move for musicians who’ve been boxed into radio-friendly simplicity: you reach for a genre that signals craft, discipline, and risk, even if the stereotype ignores how sophisticated rock can be and how juvenile jazz culture can get in its own gatekeepy ways.

Context matters, too. For a late-60s/70s-era player, jazz represented a parallel universe where chops weren’t just decoration; they were the point. Saying he “wanted” to play it frames jazz as an elective, a deliberate turn toward longevity. It’s less a confession than a rebrand: a musician trying to be heard not as a product of his moment, but as an artist with range.