Art & Creativity Quote by Billy Higgins

Billy Higgins is handing out praise, but it is praise with an edge: a gentle correction to a jazz world that too often treated Japan as a lucrative “market” rather than a serious musical partner. Saying the Japanese “approach the music on a high level” isn’t about technical chops alone. It’s a musician’s shorthand for something deeper: listening culture. Higgins is pointing to audiences and players who don’t treat jazz as background mood or retro fashion, but as a demanding language that deserves attention, discipline, and respect.

The repetition - “on a high level… always been on a high level” - matters. It’s not a throwaway compliment; it’s insistence. He’s pushing back against the idea that Japan’s jazz devotion is a recent trend or an exotic enthusiasm. “Always” asserts history: decades of collectors, hi-fi obsessives, club scenes, and local musicians who studied the music seriously and built their own traditions around it. Higgins, a drummer whose entire art depends on micro-attention from bandmates and room, would feel that difference immediately.

There’s also a subtle rebuke to American complacency. In the U.S., jazz musicians regularly fought for decent pay, decent sound, and basic respect, even as the music was mythologized. Japan, in Higgins’s telling, offers a counter-model: an environment where the craft is met with care. The line reads like gratitude, but it also exposes an irony of jazz history - that the music’s most attentive listeners are sometimes far from its birthplace.