Edward Haydn Higgins, known to friends by his middle name Haydn, was born on February 21, 1932, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He began piano at the age of four, studying first with his mother, and attended Andover Prep, where his father taught. He went to Chicago to study at the Northwestern University School of Music and started working professionally there. In 1956 he joined the band of fellow Northwestern alumnus Paul Severson, and in 1957 he began leading his own trio. In 1959 his playing and writing were part of the soundtrack of Edward Bland's documentary The Cry of Jazz, which also used music by Sun Ra; the film was chosen for the National Film Registry in 2010.

For more than two decades Higgins worked Chicago's jazz rooms, among them the Brass Rail, the Preview Lounge, the Blue Note, the Cloister Inn and Jazz, Ltd. His longest engagement was at the London House, where he led the house trio from 1957 into the late 1960s, usually with bassist Richard Evans and drummer Marshall Thompson. The room booked touring headliners, and he played opposite Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Erroll Garner, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Wes Montgomery, Oscar Peterson and George Shearing. He later called playing with Coleman Hawkins and Peterson unforgettable. He also worked as a producer for Chess Records, and he was reported to have turned down an invitation from Art Blakey to join the Jazz Messengers.

His Chicago years produced his first records as a leader and a long run of sideman dates. The Ed Higgins Trio appeared on Replica in 1957, and a Vee-Jay album followed from sessions in 1960. On October 14, 1960, he played piano on Lee Morgan's Expoobident, for which he wrote the title tune, and on November 2 and 6, 1961, he was the pianist on Wayne Shorter's Wayning Moments, which includes another of his compositions. He also recorded with Jack Teagarden and with trombonist Al Grey. For Atlantic he made the trio album Soulero in 1965 and The Piano of Eddie Higgins in 1966, the latter partly with an orchestra led by Richard Evans, and in 1969 and 1970 he played synthesizer and electric keyboards on the Electronic Concept Orchestra albums Moog Groove, Electric Love and Cinemoog.

In 1970 he moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and from then on spent winters in Florida and summers on Cape Cod, playing local clubs. From the early 1980s he worked the festival circuit and appeared often in Europe and Japan, where his recordings for the Venus label became chart-topping sellers. He recorded a Tokyo trio date in 1980 with bassist Osamu Kawakami and drummer Jimmy Takeuchi, a live sextet set at Erny's in Delray Beach in 1982, and in 1986 the album By Request with bassist Milt Hinton and drummer Bobby Rosengarden. In 1988 he married the singer and pianist Meredith d'Ambrosio; the two became a regular act at clubs and festivals and recorded together and separately for Sunnyside Records. His own Sunnyside albums included Those Quiet Days (recorded December 21, 1990, with guitarist Kevin Eubanks and bassist Rufus Reid), Zoot's Hymns (recorded 1994), Portrait in Black and White (recorded 1996) and Speaking of Jobim (recorded 1998). The Jazz Cruise inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2006.

Venus became his main label from the late 1990s. Haunted Heart (recorded June 28, 1997, with bassist Ray Drummond and drummer Ben Riley) opened a run of piano-trio albums that mostly paired him with bassist Jay Leonhart and drummer Joe Ascione. He also made quartet and quintet records featuring tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton (2001, 2002 and 2004), then with Hamilton and Ken Peplowski in 2006 and 2008, along with solo piano and Christmas albums. His last sessions were in Tokyo in August 2008 and in New York in November 2008. In 2009 Swing Journal gave him a Jazz Disc Award, naming Portraits of Love best album of the year. He had been ill for some time when he passed away on August 31, 2009, in Fort Lauderdale, of lung and lymphatic cancer, at the age of 77; planned dates in Japan and Korea that year had been suspended.

Higgins was a relaxed, melodic bop and mainstream pianist whose touch and delicacy were often compared with Bill Evans, and whose swing and clarity were likened to Oscar Peterson, Hank Jones and Nat King Cole. Critic Doug Ramsey, reviewing Portrait in Black and White in JazzTimes in 1997, described him as a generalist rather than a stylist, one who draws on every era of jazz piano without being tied to any, and ranked the trio album among the most impressive of its kind in recent memory. His range showed in the company he kept: accompanist to singers, partner to bebop-era hornmen such as Sonny Stitt, and a trio leader at ease with standards, Brazilian songs and holiday material. His own writing is best known through "Expoobident" and "Wayning Moments," both recorded by others in 1960 and 1961.