Time & Perspective Quote by Billy Higgins

Higgins is doing something sneakier than praising Japan: he is indicting America for outsourcing its own memory. Coming from a working jazz drummer who lived the inside of the scene, the line carries the weary sting of someone who has watched genius get celebrated, underpaid, forgotten, then rediscovered abroad with museum-level devotion. It is a complaint, but also a diagnosis of cultural attention as a commodity: in the U.S., jazz is treated like a glorious past tense; in Japan, it is handled like a living archive.

The intent is partly defensive pride. Jazz is America’s great original art form, born from Black innovation and survival. When Higgins says Japanese listeners know the musicians and the history better, he’s pointing at a national failure to honor the people who built the sound - not just the “greatest hits,” but the lineages, sidemen, bandstands, and local scenes that made the music possible. The subtext is about respect: who listens closely enough to learn names, dates, styles, and stories, and who prefers a vague prestige soundtrack.

Context matters. Postwar Japan developed a serious jazz culture - listening bars, meticulous record collecting, enthusiastic concert audiences - that often treated visiting American players with a reverence they didn’t always receive at home. Higgins’ remark lands as both gratitude and embarrassment. It suggests that America’s relationship to jazz is filtered through race, class, and short cultural attention spans, while outsiders can sometimes see the art more clearly because they aren’t using it to settle domestic anxieties.