Creativity Quote by Andy Summers

There is a quiet kind of brag embedded in Andy Summers saying, "I was totally into jazz in my teens" - not the loud, look-at-me variety, but the musician's way of marking origin story and credibility in a single, almost throwaway line. "Totally" is doing the heavy lifting: it signals immersion, the obsessive adolescence where taste becomes identity, while also keeping it conversational, not doctrinal. He's not staking a thesis about jazz; he's sketching the intensity that later hardens into technique.

The subtext is about apprenticeship. Jazz is less a genre than a training ground: harmony that refuses simple resolution, rhythm that rewards risk, a culture of listening harder than you play. For a guitarist who would later help define the sleek, angular vocabulary of new wave with The Police, jazz functions as the hidden scaffolding. Those suspended chords, the itchy syncopations, the way space can feel like part of the groove - they read differently when you know the player came up studying complexity before weaponizing restraint.

Context matters because Summers' generation hit adolescence when jazz still carried intellectual cool and a whiff of outsider sophistication, even as rock was becoming the mass language. Claiming jazz in your teens is also a way of saying: I wasn't just chasing hits; I was chasing vocabulary. It's a compact explanation for how someone can sound pop and still think like a composer - why the most radio-friendly parts of his work often have a restless, slightly left-of-center nerve.