Billy Higgins in the Zone: Brushwork, Breath, and Imagination

This Chapter presents an analysis of the late drummer and community leader Billy Higgins’s improvised brushwork and breathing strategies in his performance on Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia on My Mind” on his frequent collaborator’s Charles Lloyd’s recording The Water Is Wide (2000). Connecting with the book’s theme of political and cultural considerations of what it means to create Black musical space, Ashon Crawley’s “black pneuma” interpretive frame is used to help understand Higgins’s breathing strategies relative to his drumming as an orchestration of individual and community sound. Higgins’s breathing strategies during improvisation are theorized as a way to cross bar lines, accessing all colors of the human condition while creating a Black sense of musical place. Higgins’s values of musical place-making thrive through his ego-denying philosophy for the benefit of group sound throughout his career and within the social movement of Leimert Park.