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Billy Higgins (October 11, 1936 – May 3, 2001) was an American jazz drummer. He played mainly free jazz and hard bop.
May 10, 2024 · 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 ...
Oct 28, 2023 · Billy Higgins was reportedly the most recorded jazz drummer in history, and certainly one of the most beloved. Higgins was one of the most musically sensitive jazz players around, with a light but active swing.
May 3, 2001 · Known among musicians and fans as "Smiling Billy," Billy Higgins was first introduced to the broader jazz public when he came to the East Coast with the Ornette Coleman Quartet in 1959 for their extended engagement at the Five Spot Cafe.
As a member of the groundbreaking Ornette Coleman-led quartet that launched the free jazz renaissance, Billy Higgins remains one of the most important and controversial drummers in music history.
Billy Higgins was born in Bootle, Liverpool on 14th August 1945. Taking a keen interest in sport from an early age, he took up boxing, gymnastics and football while still at school. In 1965 he started to study Wado Ryu Karate and he very quickly established himself as a fast and skillful fighter.
Nov 3, 2011 · Billy Higgins, who would come to play on more than five hundred albums, including three of the biggest jazz crossover hits of the 1960s (Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man,” Lee Morgan’s “The Sidewinder,” and Eddie Harris’s “Freedom Jazz Dance”), was born in 1936 and grew up in Los Angeles.
