Billy Higgins

Billy Higgins (born October 11, 1936, Los Angeles, California, U.S.—died May 3, 2001, Inglewood, California) was an American drummer who helped create the free jazz idiom while he was a member of Ornette Coleman’s classic 1950s groups and later became the busiest drummer in jazz; he played on dozens of Blue Note albums and accompanied top jazz artists from Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane in the early 1960s to latter-day young lions Joshua Redman and Roy Hargrove. Higgins’s drumming was characterized by his enthusiastic swing, very precise beat, and crisp-sounding, stimulating, often complex interplay with soloists. Saxophonist Charles Lloyd maintained that Higgins was “like a Zen master—everybody who plays with him gets that ecstatic high.”

In his teens Higgins began playing drums with trumpeter Don Cherry and other Los Angeles bop musicians; by 1957 Coleman was teaching Higgins and Cherry to play his new kind of jazz, with improvisations based on melodies rather than on traditional harmonic patterns. The Coleman quartet created a sensation when it debuted in New York City in November 1959, but Higgins left the group in 1960. He played with Sonny Rollins’s quartet, then became a top hard bop drummer and recorded prolifically with masters such as Lee Morgan, Hank Mobley, Dexter Gordon, Jackie McLean, Herbie Hancock, and Cedar Walton.

Higgins seldom led groups but was constantly in demand, even after he moved back to Los Angeles in 1978. Besides participating in international tours with the Timeless All Stars and reunions with Coleman and Cherry, he played and acted in Bertrand Tavernier’s 1986 jazz film ’Round Midnight. Higgins then cofounded the World Stage, a Los Angeles storefront arts centre where he enticed noted jazz musicians to perform and teach; he also taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. Though liver disease curtailed his career in the 1990s, he resumed performing after a liver transplant in 1995. Two years later Higgins received a Jazz Master award from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2000 liver failure again halted his playing.