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Creativity Quote by Jeff Beck

"I was really small when jazz broke through in England and I can still remember sneaking off to the living room to listen to it on the radio - much to my parent's disapproval"

About this Quote

Beck frames his origin story as a minor act of rebellion, and it lands because it’s ordinary in the way real conversions usually are: a kid, a radio, a doorway cracked open just enough to let the future leak in. “Really small” doesn’t just mean young; it’s a reminder that jazz arrived as something bigger than him, a force you could feel before you could fully name it. The line about “jazz broke through in England” treats the music like a jailbreak or a contagion, which is exactly how postwar British culture often experienced American sounds: thrilling, slightly illicit, and impossible to keep politely contained.

The sneaking matters. Beck isn’t selling destiny; he’s selling compulsion. He listened despite consequences, which recasts taste as character: curiosity as disobedience, attention as risk. His parents’ disapproval functions as a stand-in for respectable Britain’s suspicion of Black American music and youth culture more broadly - not necessarily overt hostility, but the quiet policing of what’s proper, what’s noisy, what’s “for us.” Beck doesn’t argue with them; he just steps around them. That’s the subtext of so much guitar culture: you don’t petition tradition, you bypass it with volume.

There’s also an understated humility here. He’s not mythologizing himself as a prodigy; he’s describing a domestic scene. It’s a neat way of saying: the revolution didn’t start onstage. It started in the living room, at low volume, when the adults weren’t watching.

Quote Details

TopicMusic
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Beck, Jeff. (2026, January 15). I was really small when jazz broke through in England and I can still remember sneaking off to the living room to listen to it on the radio - much to my parent's disapproval. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-was-really-small-when-jazz-broke-through-in-153557/

Chicago Style
Beck, Jeff. "I was really small when jazz broke through in England and I can still remember sneaking off to the living room to listen to it on the radio - much to my parent's disapproval." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-was-really-small-when-jazz-broke-through-in-153557/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I was really small when jazz broke through in England and I can still remember sneaking off to the living room to listen to it on the radio - much to my parent's disapproval." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-was-really-small-when-jazz-broke-through-in-153557/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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Jeff Beck recalls discovering jazz on the radio
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About the Author

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Jeff Beck (June 24, 1944 - January 10, 2023) was a Musician from United Kingdom.

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