Time & Perspective Quote by Billy Higgins

Higgins is talking like a working drummer who’s spent a lifetime making split-second decisions with other people’s breath and pulse in the room. “It” is deliberately vague, which is the point: he’s not reducing music to a technique, a career, or even a genre. He’s naming the only place improvisation actually happens. Yesterday is chops, habits, and the mythology of what you’ve played. Tomorrow is ambition, reputation, and the anxious math of where the band thinks the tune is headed. “All right now” cuts through both, insisting that the real job is attention.

The phrasing has a drummer’s economy. No ornament, no metaphysics, just a clean refusal to let time become an excuse. In jazz especially, time is the currency, and Higgins flips it: time isn’t a grid you obey, it’s a living thing you enter. That’s why the line reads less like Zen branding and more like shop-floor wisdom from someone who backed Ornette Coleman and a thousand club dates besides. The subtext is almost ethical: don’t hide behind memory, don’t posture toward the future, don’t narrate yourself while you’re playing. Show up and listen.

Context matters: postwar jazz is full of arguments about tradition versus innovation, “paying dues” versus breaking rules. Higgins sidesteps the debate by relocating value to the present tense. It’s a quiet rebuke to nostalgia and to careerist hustle, and a reminder that what audiences feel as “feel” is just commitment to the moment, repeated beat after beat.