Education Quote by Billy Higgins

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.