Fatherhood Quote by Billy Sherwood

Sherwood’s sentence has the casual looseness of a backstage recollection, but it’s doing careful identity work. “Always around music” isn’t just biography; it’s a claim of inevitability, a way of framing a career as environment rather than ambition. That matters for a musician whose credibility often depends on lineage: you’re not a tourist, you’re a native.

The most interesting phrase is “in his own way.” It signals affection and a gentle hedge at once. Sherwood wants to honor his father’s “progressive” spirit without forcing him into a purist genre box. The double-tag “a progressive jazzer, a big band jazzer guy” sounds like someone reaching for the right label, then correcting it, then adding another. That stumble is the subtext: musical influence is messy, and family influence is messier. “Progressive” here isn’t a strict reference to prog-rock aesthetics so much as an attitude: curiosity, risk, arrangement-heavy thinking. Big band, meanwhile, implies discipline, charts, sections, a communal machine of sound. Put together, he’s sketching the DNA of his own musicianship: precision plus experimentation.

Culturally, the line bridges two reputations that don’t always get to share a sentence. Big band can read as traditional; “progressive” reads as forward-leaning. Sherwood collapses that false divide, suggesting that innovation often comes from inside supposedly conservative forms. It’s also a subtle defense of eclecticism: if your earliest model was someone who could swing and still push boundaries, genre-hopping stops looking like indecision and starts looking like inheritance.