His dexterity and understanding caught the attention of the city's jazz musicians, and before long he was playing with the their finest, including Dexter Gordon, Teddy Edwards and Leroy Vinnegar. When he joined a quartet led by the bassist Red Mitchell in 1957 he befriended James Clay, the group's fine saxophone player, and it was with the quartet that Higgins made his first recordings.At this time he began rehearsing along with the trumpeter Don Cherry at the home of Ornette Coleman, a saxophonist whose ideas tore at the whole structure of jazz. In 1959 Higgins appeared with Coleman for a much-extended season at the Five Spot in New York, where the jazz cognoscenti largely dismissed Coleman's controversial music as incongruous rubbish.Higgins stayed with Coleman for two years, including a full year at the Five Spot. Coleman persisted, and by the time the cognoscenti had acknowledged him had moved on to new fields.

Miles Davis, in particular with his 1959 album Kind of Blue, had laid down signposts for the future of jazz. Coleman chose to ignore them and the music that he then created can be regarded either as an alternative righteous path or as a time-wasting digression.Higgins played on three of the most controversial of Coleman's albums, and finally left the quartet after being involved with the police over drug problems. The management of the Five Spot told him that he could no longer work there. He moved on to become the busiest drummer in jazz.After Coleman he joined Thelonious Monk and then the quartet led by John Coltrane.

Now based in New York, he became virtually the house drummer at Blue Note Records and played in clubs and on tour with all the most prominent musicians at the cutting edge of the music. Among them were Sonny Rollins, Art Pepper, Hank Mobley, Steve Lacy, Milt Jackson, Donald Byrd, Lee Morgan and Herbie Hancock.During the Seventies he began a partnership with the pianist Cedar Walton that lasted until 1978, when he decided to return to Los Angeles. He soon had as much work there as he had had in New York and when it was fashionable worked in the so-called jazz-rock and jazz funk fields, but always returned to more orthodox playing. He returned also for periodic reunions with Ornette Coleman.Towards the end of the Eighties he joined a local poet, Kamau Daaood, to open the World Stage in Los Angeles.

Higgins ran jazz workshops at the centre and brought in visiting jazz stars to teach young musicians.Higgins won a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master's Fellowship in 1997 By then he had had a liver transplant. He was awaiting a second transplant at the time of his death.Steve Voce. Ian Lennox McHarg, landscape architect, regional planner and teacher: born Clydebank, Dunbartonshire 20 November 1920; Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, University of Pennsylvania 1954-86 (Emeritus); married 1942 Pauline Crena DeJong (died 1974; two sons), secondly Carol Smyser (two sons); died West Chester, Pennsylvania 5 March 2001. Ian Lennox McHarg, landscape architect, regional planner and teacher: born Clydebank, Dunbartonshire 20 November 1920; Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, University of Pennsylvania 1954-86 (Emeritus); married 1942 Pauline Crena DeJong (died 1974; two sons), secondly Carol Smyser (two sons); died West Chester, Pennsylvania 5 March 2001. "The world is abundant, we require only a deference born of understanding to fulfil human promise," wrote Ian McHarg in the introduction to the 1992 edition of his book Design with Nature (first published in 1969). McHarg was one of the first people to recognise and call attention to the abysmal lack of knowledge of the environment in planning, design and enginneering.This, he understood, was due not only to lack of interest, but also to the fact that the sciences were fragmented and communication was rare among separate disciplines. To solve these problems he created an "ecological planning method" to explore the physical, biological and social processes that shape each place. Working from a foundation of climate and geology, each layer of information was superimposed on top of the previous one.

In this way the primary patterns of the landscape emerged to guide the form of development.The goal of this "McHargian Method" was to determine what constitutes a balanced and self-renewing environment. In this respect he anticipated sustainable design and his early use of computers for his "layer cake" was the foundation of the Geographical Information Systems now widely used as planning tools.McHarg was born and brought up outside Glasgow, a city he called "a sandstone excretion cemented with smoke and grime". At the start of the Second World War, he joined the Army as a paratrooper; he served with distinction and rose to the rank of major.After the war, although he had not attended university, he enrolled at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, earning graduate degrees in both Landscape Architecture and City Planning. He then returned to Scotland, where he worked for several years as a planner.McHarg was brought to the United States again, to the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, with other promising young men, by the new Dean, G. Holmes Perkins, to reorganise and revitalise the Graduate School of Fine Arts.