Faith & Spirit Quote by Billy Higgins

Higgins is slipping a big metaphysical claim into an everyday musician-to-musician truth: some experiences don’t argue for meaning, they make meaning audible. Calling jazz “one of the few things” that reveals God isn’t Sunday-morning piety so much as a working drummer’s testimony about what happens when a band locks in. Jazz doesn’t “prove” creation; it stages it, nightly, out of fragments - a standard, a riff, a wrong turn - that become, through attention and risk, a living order.

The line lands because it treats improvisation as evidence. Jazz is built on constraints (changes, tempo, form) and then on the miracle of choice inside them. Higgins is pointing to that feeling musicians chase: the moment when independent minds synchronize without surrendering individuality, when swing turns time into something almost physical. If you’re looking for a secular vocabulary, he’s describing awe; if you’re comfortable with religious language, he’s describing grace. Either way, the subtext is anti-cynical: against the idea that everything is mere hustle, jazz insists on transcendence that can be practiced.

Context matters. Higgins came up in the hard miles of bebop and post-bop, where genius was communal and the payoff was rarely economic. For Black American musicians especially, jazz has long carried the weight of invention under pressure - beauty made in spite of history. So “creation” here isn’t abstract cosmology; it’s the stubborn fact that something new can be made, together, in real time, and that this newness feels like contact with something larger than the room.