Billy Higgins infos
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Billy Higgins: Master Drummer of Modern Jazz
2001-05-08
Billy Higgins will always be ranked high on any list of the greatest
drummers in jazz. He emerged to widespread attention when Ornette
Coleman's ground-breaking quartet arrived in New York from California
in 1959, and proceeded to create a schism in the jazz world which has
echoes to this day. Higgins went on to build one of the most diverse
careers in modern jazz, and added his own particular magic to any
setting in which he featured.
His activities as a band leader in his own right were limited to
occasional recordings and appearances, but his contribution to
contemporary music across four decades was enormous. He was virtually
the house drummer at Blue Note Records in their highly productive
heyday in the early 1960, and went on to amass a huge discography in a
host of contexts, stretching from straightahead jazz sessions to free
improvisation, and on to collaborations with the likes of the
idiosyncratic folk musician Sandy Bull, who died earlier this year.
His list of associations stretched from Ornette Coleman, Thelonious
Monk and John Coltrane in the early 1960s through to contemporary
stars like Pat Metheny, Roy Hargrove and Joshua Redman. His ability to
adapt to any style or setting was only part of the reason for his high
standing. More importantly, he was able to imprint his own distinctive
mastery of time, swing and groove on the music in entirely
complementary fashion, without getting in the way of the leader's
intentions.
His ebullient on-stage presence and sheer joy in making music always
shone through. He was an energising force, lifting and shaping the
music with his deft, highly musical rhythmic patterns. As the great
trumpeter Lee Morgan once succinctly observed, Higgins "never
overplays, but you always know he's there", while another of his
satisfied employers, saxophonist Charles Lloyd, observed that "Billy
is like a Zen master -- everybody who plays with him gets that
ecstatic high".
He began playing drums as a child in his native Los Angeles, and
worked briefly with rhythm and blues artists like Amos Milburn, Jimmy
Witherspoon and Bo Diddley before joining the Jazz Messiahs in 1953, a
band which also featured trumpeter Don Cherry, whom Higgins had met in
high school, and saxophonist James Clay.
Clay introduced them to Ornette Coleman, then entirely unknown, and
they began working with him on his controversial approach to music,
which set aside the accepted swing and bop conventions of improvising
over chord sequences in favour of a more radical concept of melodic
development, which he later dubbed harmolodics.
Higgins performed and recorded with Red Mitchell in 1957, but later
recalled that they spent about three years simply rehearsing with
Ornette before anyone finally gave them a gig. That occasion, when
they joined pianist Paul Bley at the Hilcrest Club for a week in 1958,
was singularly unsuccessful in audience terms, but on the bandstand
new directions were opening out for all of the musicians.
Coleman's arrival in New York for a residence at the Five Spot Cafe in
1959 quickly became a sensation, with the jazz world lining up to
praise or damn the new approach. Coleman's music made heavy demands on
the drummer, and the saxophonist was fortunate in having first Higgins
and then Ed Blackwell as his regular drummers.
Higgins quickly established himself on the New York scene, and began
to rack up that long and impressive list of associations. The dominant
hard bop style of the mid to late 1950s was still pervasive, but was
now giving way to a more fluid style of interpretation, while the
success of Miles Davis's modal experiments on Kind of Blue and the
impact of the so-called free jazz of Coleman and Cecil Taylor opened
up new alternative directions for jazz.
Higgins was able to master all of them, but became particularly
associated with the musicians who were extending bop in fresh
directions. He worked and recorded with the likes of Dexter Gordon,
Sonny Rollins, Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley, Herbie Hancock, Lee Morgan
and Donald Byrd (among many others), often but not exclusively for
Alfred Lion's Blue Note label.
The sale of Blue Note to Liberty Records in 1967 and the subsequent
rise of jazz-fusion marked the end of an era, but Higgins continued to
be in constant demand. He worked frequently with pianist Cedar Walton,
and was a co-leader of a band named the Brass Company in 1972-3. He
recorded notable albums with Milt Jackson, Art Pepper and J. J.
Johnson in the late 1970s, and made occasional records as a leader,
mostly for European labels.
He worked with saxophonist Joe Henderson in the early 1980s, and with
trombonist Slide Hampton in 1985, a year in which he also appeared
alongside Dexter Gordon in Bertrand Tavernier's film Round Midnight.
He was part of the great trio which guitarist Pat Metheny assembled
for his album Rejoicing (1983), with bassist Charlie Haden, another
veteran of the original Ornette Coleman Quartet, and was a member of
the first version of Haden's Quartet West in the mid-1980s.
He rejoined Coleman in 1987 when the saxophonist reformed his original
quartet with Cherry and Haden, both to tour and to record the In All
Languages album. He recorded with Don Cherry again during the
trumpeter's association with A&M in the late 1980s, making up a
quartet on Art Deco (1988) which also included Haden and James Clay.
He recorded with Sun Ra during this period as well, also for A&M.
Higgins had returned to live in Los Angeles in 1978, and in the late
1980s he joined forces with poet Kamau Daaood to launch the World
Stage, a store front venue for workshops, community activities and
concerts, which has supported the activities of both writers and
musicians. He used his huge range of contacts to bring major jazz
names to the modest venue, and dispensed advice and support to many
young musicians. He was also involved in teaching jazz in more formal
settings, and was on the jazz faculty at the University of California
in Los Angeles. He was awarded a Jazz Master's Fellowship by the
National Endowment for the Arts in 1997.
His own musical activities were temporarily suspended by a serious
liver disease in the early 1990s, but he returned to playing after a
transplant in 1995. That liver had also begun to fail, however, and he
was unable to play from late last year. Recent fund-raising concerts
and appeals, led by bassist Larry Grenadier, were aimed at helping
defray his medical expenses for a proposed second transplant. However,
he was admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia, and died there
of the disease. He is survived by four sons, a stepson, a daughter,
and a brother.
Kenny Mathieson is a freelance writer based in Scotland. His book
Giant Steps: Bebop and The Creators of Modern Jazz (1999) is published
by Payback Press. E-mail: ken...@dircon.co.uk
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