This is from the same tune as the recent post Comping The Billy Way— Things Ain’t What They Used To Be, with Hank Jones and Ray Drummond, from the album The Essence. Here Higgins is […]
Category: Billy Higgins
Comping the Billy way
Here’s a fresh lesson on simplicity in comping in jazz— file this along with the post about the “Kenny” note from a few years ago. I’ve transcribed some ideas from Billy Higgins’s playing on Things […]
Jeff Watts on Billy Higgins
This is from Ted Panken’s memorial drummers’ roundtable on Billy Higgins, broadcast on WKCR after Billy Higgins’s death in 2001. Here Jeff Watts talks about what Higgins meant to him: I first began to collect […]
Transcription: Billy Higgins / Tears Inside
Tears Inside, from Pat Metheny’s album Rejoicing, is such a favorite track of mine, I’m surprised we haven’t done anything with it before. I did transcribe the drum intro for the forthcoming[!!!] Book of Intros. So […]
Grooves o’ the day: Rumproller
Eaaasing back into blogging after an eventful couple of weeks, with some grooves by Billy Higgins, from Lee Morgan’s album The Rumproller. First, the groove from the title track: Often he’ll accent the & of […]
Random Billy
For fun I’ve pulled at random some four measure comping phrases from recordings featuring Billy Higgins on drums. Sort of at random: I’ve grabbed the first thing I heard on the track that stands out […]
Transcription: Billy Higgins — Shimmy Shewobble
Let’s start the fund raiser with something amazing I never knew existed: Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell playing Mississippi Delta drum-and-fife style, performing Othar Turner’s classic Shimmy Shewobble, on Stanley Cowell’s album Regeneration. You may have […]
Ornette live in ’58
Here’s something remarkable: Ornette Coleman recorded live in LA in 1958, just before his big national exposure in New York. The band includes the musicians in his famous quartet: Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Billy […]
Billy’s best
Here’s some more essential Billy Higgins listening for you. I hesitate to declare anything the best— because a) the man played on over 700 albums, of which I have been exposed to, what, 5-7%? And […]
1/2 of a concert with 3/5 of the Four & More band
First I want to acknowledge that headline… that just happened… OK… Does it seem like we’re in a Billy Higgins trough right now? I don’t feel like he’s getting talked about a lot— the current […]
What’s going on: my recording of Ornette Coleman’s Mothers of the Veil
While I was traveling recently, I got a note from a reader who had very kindly purchased my CD Little Played Little Bird, the music of Ornette Coleman, asking for some analysis and explanation of […]
VOQOTD: Lew Tabackin on Billy Higgins
“Playing with Billy was like heaven. He was the greatest collaborator in the history of jazz. He played exactly right for you at exactly the right time. His dynamics were perfect, he balanced his energy […]