Billy Higgins was born October 11, 1936, in Los Angeles, California, and began his career playing R&B, supporting headliners including Bo Diddley, Amos Milburn, and Jimmy Witherspoon. He rose to fame in the late 1950s as a member of the groundbreaking Ornette Coleman Quartet, playing on Coleman's first records starting in 1958. Higgins followed Coleman when the group relocated to New York in 1959 for a residency at the Five Spot Café; with the addition of bassist Charlie Haden, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile, Coleman finally began to fully realize the sounds and structures he'd pursued for years.

Higgins became the busiest drummer in jazz, playing on dozens of Blue Note albums and accompanying artists across generations, from Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane in the early 1960s to later "young lion" players including Joshua Redman and Roy Hargrove. Though he recorded relatively few sessions as a leader, he played on more than 700 recordings across his career in an extraordinary range of musical contexts, including bassist Sam Jones's 1976 album Eastern Rebellion; Jones's own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile.

Higgins's career was interrupted in the 1990s by kidney disease, leading to a kidney transplant. He died May 3, 2001, in Inglewood, California, of complications related to liver and kidney failure, at age 64.

Higgins's light-touch, endlessly adaptable drumming, equally at home in Ornette Coleman's free jazz revolution and in straight-ahead Blue Note hard bop sessions, made him one of the most versatile and most recorded drummers in jazz history.