Creativity Quote by Billy Higgins

Higgins is pitching jazz not as a niche taste but as a public good: a music built to survive difference. Coming from a working drummer who spent his life in clubs, on bandstands, and inside the messy, collaborative engine room of American culture, the line reads like a quiet rebuttal to every gatekeeper who’s treated jazz as either museum music or a members-only language. He’s insisting on immediacy. You can walk in cold, no background, no pedigree, and still catch the feeling.

The phrasing matters. “It’s something that -” and the rest of the sentence tumbling forward feels like a musician thinking in real time, vamping until the downbeat lands. “I don’t care where you’re from” isn’t just inclusivity rhetoric; it’s defiance. Jazz has been coded as Black, bohemian, intellectual, “difficult,” even un-American at various moments. Higgins flips that history into a claim of radical hospitality: the very traits that scare people off - improvisation, risk, conversation without a script - are what make the door wider. You don’t need to “get it” to get something.

The subtext is also about labor and listening. Jazz is one of the “few things” you can still go hear live and feel a genuine exchange, not a product delivered the same way every night. Higgins isn’t promising that everyone will like the same solo; he’s arguing that jazz contains multiple entry points at once: rhythm you can ride, melody you can follow, attitude you can recognize, community you can step into. In an era of genre tribalism, he frames jazz as a commons: complex, yes, but built for strangers to meet.