Billy Higgins was born October 11, 1936, in Los Angeles, California, and started playing drums at age five, working with a local teacher before he was out of grade school. By his teens he was already gigging with L.A. beboppers Sonny Criss and Teddy Edwards while also picking up R&B work behind touring headliners including Bo Diddley, Amos Milburn, and Jimmy Witherspoon — a dual apprenticeship, in the dance-hall groove and the harmonic complexity of bebop, that shaped the rest of his career.

Around 1953, saxophonist James Clay introduced Higgins to alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman. What followed was roughly three years of private rehearsals before the group that would become the Ornette Coleman Quartet had anywhere to play; their first public engagement came at Los Angeles's Hillcrest Club in 1958, a now-legendary gig later documented on record. Coleman's earliest studio albums followed in quick succession, each one confirmed in Discogs's personnel data as featuring Higgins on drums: Something Else!!!! (1958, Contemporary, with bassist Don Payne) and, after the quartet's move to New York and the addition of bassist Charlie Haden, The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century (both 1959, Atlantic). Haden's own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. The quartet's 1959 residency at New York's Five Spot Café became one of the defining events in the emergence of free jazz, dividing critics and musicians alike over whether Coleman's harmonically unmoored music was a hoax or a revolution. Higgins remained Coleman's drummer through 1960 and returned to the fold periodically for decades afterward, including the landmark double-quartet session Free Jazz (1961, on which he and drummer Ed Blackwell play simultaneously, one on each stereo channel), Science Fiction (1971), and In All Languages (1987).

Through the 1960s Higgins became, by common description, the unofficial house drummer for Blue Note Records, turning up on session after session of the era's defining hard bop. Discogs personnel data confirms his presence on Dexter Gordon's Go! (1962), Herbie Hancock's debut Takin' Off (1962), Jackie McLean's A Fickle Sonance (1962), Lee Morgan's chart-topping The Sidewinder (1964, with Joe Henderson on tenor), and Hank Mobley's Dippin' (1965) — a small sample of a Blue Note run that ran to dozens of albums across the decade. He also recorded directly with Thelonious Monk, appearing on Thelonious Monk at the Blackhawk (recorded live in San Francisco, April 29, 1960), and with Cecil Taylor, on the pianist's January 1961 sessions for Candid alongside Steve Lacy, Archie Shepp, Roswell Rudd, and Clark Terry — sessions later reissued under several titles, including Cecil Taylor All Stars; Taylor is profiled separately on JazzProfiles.com. Across his career Higgins would go on to record on more than 700 sessions in total, an output that makes him one of the most recorded drummers in jazz history.

Higgins began stepping out as a leader in the late 1970s, cutting Soweto (1979) and Once More (1980) for the Italian Red Records label with a working quartet built around pianist Cedar Walton, and The Soldier (1981) for the Dutch label Timeless. That same Walton partnership also produced Higgins's highest-profile group work of the decade: Eastern Rebellion, a cooperative band with Walton, bassist Sam Jones, and a rotating saxophone chair, which recorded three albums for Timeless between 1976 and 1980 — Jones's own career, including this partnership, is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. In 1977 Higgins became Muslim, and after some time away returned to Los Angeles in 1978; Discogs still lists "Karim Abdullah" among his recorded name variations from this period. He continued to lead sessions through the 1980s, including Mr. Billy Higgins (1985, Riza Records) and Bridgework (1987, Contemporary Records), while remaining one of the most in-demand sidemen in jazz — among other dates, he shared the drum chair with John Guerin on bassist Ray Brown's 1990 West Coast big-band session I'm Walking, alongside Walton and arranger John Clayton; Brown's own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile.

Higgins also has a small but notable screen and awards history: he appeared on camera behind Dexter Gordon in Bertrand Tavernier's 1986 film 'Round Midnight, and co-wrote and performed on "Call Sheet Blues" — credited to Higgins alongside Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Wayne Shorter — from the soundtrack album The Other Side of 'Round Midnight, which won the 1987 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition.

In 1989, Higgins co-founded The World Stage, a cultural and performance space in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, together with poet and community arts activist Kamau Daáood, with early support from pianist Horace Tapscott. Higgins taught a weekly drum workshop there for years, drawing on his professional network to bring major jazz names in as performers and teachers and using the space to mentor the next generation of Los Angeles musicians — among them a teenage Daniel Freedman, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. In 1997 Higgins joined the jazz studies faculty at UCLA and received the National Endowment for the Arts' Jazz Masters Fellowship, the country's highest honor in the field, the same year. He kept recording as a leader into the 1990s, including 3/4 for Peace (1994, Red Records, with tenor saxophonist Harold Land), and remained a working musician into his final years, notably in a late-career partnership with saxophonist Charles Lloyd.

Higgins's health began to decline in the early 1990s with a serious liver disease. He underwent a liver transplant in March 1996, and when that transplant failed, a second the following day; he recovered well enough to be performing again within the year. His condition worsened again in the months before his death, and the jazz community organized benefit concerts to help fund a further transplant. While waiting, Higgins contracted pneumonia and was hospitalized; he died May 3, 2001, at Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Inglewood, California, of complications from liver and kidney failure, at age 64.

Higgins's drumming was defined by an unusually light, buoyant touch and an almost total stylistic range: the same musician who helped invent the vocabulary of free jazz behind Ornette Coleman spent the 1960s locking into the tightest, most economical hard-bop grooves on record for Blue Note. Critics and colleagues alike singled out his "smile" as a musical quality as much as a personal one — a sense of joy and ease audible in his time-keeping that made him equally suited to open, structureless improvisation and to driving a blues-drenched shuffle. That adaptability, paired with a reputation for genuine sensitivity to whatever a bandleader or a tune required, made him one of the most called-upon and most recorded drummers in jazz history, trusted across five decades and nearly every idiom the music produced.