"I think that people should learn about that. In most music, there's one way that you do something, and that's the only way. In jazz, it's a lot different"
About this Quote
Higgins is pitching jazz not as a genre but as a civic skill: a way of learning how to be with other people. The opening, almost plainspoken "people should learn about that" lands like a quiet rebuke. He is not talking to drummers, or even to musicians. He is talking to a culture trained to treat rules as safety and compliance as craft.
The contrast he draws is deliberately blunt: "most music" has "one way" and "that's the only way". He is exaggerating, but strategically. By flattening everything else into a single, correct method, he makes jazz pop as an ethical alternative: music built on multiple right answers, negotiated in real time. The subtext is anti-authoritarian without sounding like a manifesto. Higgins doesn't need to say "freedom"; he implies it through structure. Jazz is a practice where listening outranks obedience, where mistakes can become material, where individuality is only meaningful if it stays in conversation with the group.
Coming from Higgins, a master of accompaniment, the line carries extra bite. Drummers are often treated as the human metronome; Higgins reframes the job as a kind of social intelligence, shaping time rather than merely keeping it. His context is late-20th-century America, where jazz was simultaneously canonized and misunderstood: celebrated as heritage while its improvisational risk was domesticated into background music. Higgins is insisting that the point was never polish. The point was possibility.
The contrast he draws is deliberately blunt: "most music" has "one way" and "that's the only way". He is exaggerating, but strategically. By flattening everything else into a single, correct method, he makes jazz pop as an ethical alternative: music built on multiple right answers, negotiated in real time. The subtext is anti-authoritarian without sounding like a manifesto. Higgins doesn't need to say "freedom"; he implies it through structure. Jazz is a practice where listening outranks obedience, where mistakes can become material, where individuality is only meaningful if it stays in conversation with the group.
Coming from Higgins, a master of accompaniment, the line carries extra bite. Drummers are often treated as the human metronome; Higgins reframes the job as a kind of social intelligence, shaping time rather than merely keeping it. His context is late-20th-century America, where jazz was simultaneously canonized and misunderstood: celebrated as heritage while its improvisational risk was domesticated into background music. Higgins is insisting that the point was never polish. The point was possibility.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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