Billy Higgins

By VARIETY STAFF

Jazz drummer Billy Higgins, who helped saxophonist Ornette Coleman develop his revolutionary "free jazz" style in the late 1950s, died May 4 while awaiting his second liver transplant at Daniel Freeman Hospital in Los Angeles, where he was admitted with pneumonia a few days earlier. He was 64.

Higgins, one of the most frequently recorded jazz drummers and a mainstay of the Los Angeles jazz scene, recorded with many jazz greats, including Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, John Coltrane, Charles Lloyd, Milt Jackson, Herbie Hancock and Lee Morgan. He was famed for a swinging style that went far beyond genre.

Higgins is the drummer on such seminal Coleman recordings as "The Shape of Jazz to Come," "This Is Our Music" and "Something Else." He shared drumming duties with Ed Blackwell on the famed album "Free Jazz," whose cover by abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock paid tribute to the splashing sound of the music inside.

Born in Los Angeles, Higgins started playing drums as a child and began working with Coleman in his early 20s. He recorded with Coleman in the late 1950s and early 1960s and then recorded on the Blue Note label during the heyday of its "hard bop" period. He also played extensively with Rollins and pianist Cedar Walton during the 1960s.