Billy Higgins, one of the finest, most innovative and prolific drummers in jazz, died on May 4th in Los Angeles, while awaiting a liver transplant. He was sixty-four.

Higgins was admitted to the Daniel Freeman Hospital a few days earlier to be treated for pneumonia. He had undergone a liver transplant five years ago, but fell ill again late last year and on February 5th he was put on the waiting list for another one.

Higgins was born on October 11, 1936 in Los Angeles and got his start playing R&B in his hometown. After meeting trumpeter Don Cherry in the mid-Fifties, the pair set about changing the face of jazz.

Though he recorded with a number of jazz's biggest names, Higgins' legacy is best defined by his stint playing with Cherry on Ornette Coleman's genre-shaking late-Fifties recordings, which are credited as the birth of free jazz: Something Else!!! The Music of Ornette Coleman (1958), Art of the Improvisers (1959), Change of the Century (1959), Shape of Jazz to Come (1959) and Free Jazz (1960).

Over the next forty years, Higgins would continue to work with Coleman as well as drumming for a who's who of jazz frontliners in a variety of genres and soundscapes, including Donald Byrd, Don Cherry, Dexter Gordon, Grant Green, Herbie Hancock, Milt Jackson, Charles Lloyd , Thelonius Monk, Lee Morgan, Sonny Rollins and Cecil Taylor.

But it was his work with Coleman that provided bookends to his sterling career. Last June, Higgins appeared with Coleman and bassist Charlie Haden for the crown jewel of the Knitting Factory's Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival, a triumphant trio performance titled "Change of the Century" before thousands at New York City's Battery Park.

As testament to how the jazz community felt about Higgins, the drummer's peers, friends and fellow performers had pulled together throughout the year to raise money for his medical bills. Charles Lloyd, Harold Land, Bobby Matos and others played at Bones & Blues in Los Angeles on January 22nd, while Lloyd, Pharoah Sanders, Bobby Hutcherson and Larry Grenadier were among those who turned out for a pair of performances at Yoshi's in Los Angeles on March 20th. Another tribute, on April 22nd in New York City, featured Wynton Marsalis and Mulgrew Miller.

Higgins' funeral was held today in California.

ANDREW DANSBY
(May 7, 2001)