In 1983, Eddie Higgins had been recognized as an outstanding pianist for over three decades, particularly in and around Chicago. He worked with his trio at all the best clubs and his twelve-year run at the London House was the stuff of legends, but despite remarkable career I didn’t know anything about him, possibly because I was in New York and he was in Chicago. He was just a name on a list; part of a band Wild Bill Davison had assembled to be part of the first of what would lead to twenty Floating Jazz Festivals.

I finally took notice at a concert in the Saga Theater. It was an afternoon at sea and Wild Bill and his guys were working their way through some traditional Dixieland standards. For the most part, they were on automatic, with an occasional burst from Chuck Hedges or even Wild Bill himself. Towards the end of the concert, Bill began featuring his sidemen as soloists and at one point he announced the next number would be a piano solo by Eddie Higgins. What happened next was remarkable.

There were many outstanding performances during the twenty-year run of the Floating Jazz Festival. Some were outstanding musical accomplishments, others were historic reunions, others were poignant farewells, but in terms of sheer audience reaction, a very spontaneous reaction because no one saw it coming, Eddie Higgin’s performance of St. Louis Blues that afternoon probably was the most remarkable I ever witnessed on the ship.

Eddie took that old war-horse of a tune and turned it inside out, ending the tour de force by turning it into a boogie woogie spectacular that drove the audience wild. They were standing and screaming, and I was right along with them.  It was a terrific moment and I was so impressed that Eddie appeared at the festival for the next fifteen years. He set the record for the longest uninterrupted run at our event and every year we’d always find an appropriate spot to feature Eddie and his remarkable rendition of the St. Louis Blues. The audience never tired of it and neither did I.

Of course, there was much, much more to Eddie Higgins than that one tune.  He’s one of a group of musicians that other musicians hold in extremely high regard, he was after all, accompanying Coleman Hawkins in his early twenties and a host of other giants, but he wasn’t, to use that old cliché, a musician’s musician. He was really a listener’s musician, a pianist who had the following characteristics: versatility, reliability, personality and knew a zillion tunes. 

Unfortunately, these are not the kind of credentials that gets any pianist into many venues in New York City. About the only time Eddie’s came to New York was to make a record, sometimes for a domestic company, but more likely, for someone in Japan, where he had legions of followers. I don’t know how many CDs he released in Japan but it was a sizable number and in those years one was far more likely to run into Eddie in Tokyo than in New York City, or in anyplace in the United States, except a beach on Cape Cod or in Florida. There was a time when you could always find him every October, strolling on the S/S Norwy’s Internationale Deck with Meredith D’Ambrosio, or sailing a little rented boat in the lagoon of Great Stirrup Cay, but that’s as long ago as that electric afternoon in the Saga Theater in 1983.

Eddie Higgins, Club Internationale, S/S Norway at Sea, October 1997