Fatherhood Quote by Benny Green

There’s a quiet plot twist packed into Benny Green’s offhand confession: the moment a living art form gets mistaken for a family heirloom. “Older people, like my father” isn’t just biography; it’s a snapshot of how jazz slipped, in mid-century Britain, from the center of nightlife into the back room of memory. Green is admitting to a kind of inherited misreading, where the music arrives already framed as someone else’s era, someone else’s authority.

The phrasing matters. “Associated” is psychological, not musical; he’s talking about social coding, not chord changes. He’s describing jazz as an identity marker before it becomes a passion. That’s the subtext: taste isn’t neutral. It’s policed by age, class, and the fear of seeming out-of-date. For a young musician coming up amid skiffle, swing hangovers, and the first shocks of rock ’n’ roll, jazz could feel like a paternal suit - respectable, expert, faintly dusted with nostalgia.

Green’s intent reads as both self-deprecating and corrective. He’s showing how easily culture gets mislabeled as “for them,” and how that label can be overturned by proximity: hearing it live, meeting players, discovering the charge behind the canon. The line also nods to a deeper jazz irony: a music built on rebellion and reinvention ends up treated as tradition. Green’s career becomes the rebuttal - proof that “dad’s music” can still be a young person’s engine.