Art & Creativity Quote by Billy Higgins

Higgins is doing two things at once: pleading for jazz and quietly indicting the culture that treats it like an elective. “Jazz needs the help” lands with the plainspoken urgency of a working musician who knows that artistry doesn’t automatically translate into airtime. The line isn’t romantic. It’s pragmatic, almost union-talk: a genre is a job ecosystem, and without visibility the whole infrastructure collapses.

Calling jazz “the more sophisticated music” risks sounding elitist, but Higgins frames it less as bragging rights and more as a diagnosis. Sophistication here means density: improvisation, harmonic risk, the constant negotiation between individual voice and group structure. That complexity is exactly what mass media tends to sand down. When he says “all the other music is on the TV,” he’s pointing to distribution, not merit. Television stands in for the larger promotional machine: labels, marketing budgets, formats built for quick recognition and easy consumption.

The sting is in the last clause: “but jazz isn’t.” It’s a simple contrast that reveals the hierarchy of attention. Jazz, long positioned as America’s high art, is treated like a niche hobby in the very country that exported it. Higgins came up in an era when jazz migrated from pop center to cultural sidebar as rock and later hip-hop dominated screens. His subtext is that neglect isn’t neutral; it’s a choice with consequences. If the most demanding, collaborative, historically rich music can’t get space in the main channel, the problem isn’t jazz’s relevance. It’s the gatekeepers’ imagination.