Creativity Quote by Billy Higgins

There is a quiet radicalism in how Billy Higgins builds this thought: three short lines, each one widening the circle. First “people,” then the more volatile “races,” then the even more historically loaded “religions.” The repetition isn’t decorative; it’s a drummer’s rhetoric, a steady backbeat that insists on momentum. Higgins isn’t arguing in abstractions so much as testifying from the bandstand, where cooperation isn’t a metaphor. If you can’t listen, adjust, and leave space, the music falls apart in real time.

As a jazz musician who came up through mid-century America, Higgins would have known what “together” cost. Integrated ensembles were common in jazz long before the country caught up, but the world outside the club remained segregated by law, custom, and threat. So the line carries subtext: music becomes a temporary borderless zone, an earned truce, not a naive fantasy. “It” is left deliberately undefined because he’s talking about more than a genre. He’s pointing to the social technology of rhythm itself: a shared pulse that makes strangers coordinate their bodies and attention.

The phrasing also avoids piety. He doesn’t claim music erases difference; he claims it convenes difference. That’s an important distinction in a culture that often sells “unity” as sameness. Higgins is staking out a modest, durable ideal: not harmony as agreement, but harmony as coexistence, negotiated measure by measure.