MUSIC-USA: Jimmy Heath Still Bounces in a Big Band at 70

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Nov 5 1996 (IPS) - He’s been called one of jazz music’s thoroughbreds by famed trumpeter Miles Davis, he’s played with musicians from Charlie Parker to Wynton Marsalis, and he’s even brought his act to fellow saxophonist Bill Clinton’s White House.

For all that, saxophonist and bandleader Jimmy Heath has never been one of the most famous jazz musicians, nor has he ever struck it rich.

Heath, who still teaches jazz at Queens University and leads a bid band that played New York’s famous Blue Note club last week, turned 70 on Oct 25, and could boast at his band’s most recent star- studded gigs, “You’ve got nothing but the best up here.”

Heath himself has often been honoured as the best. Miles Davis and John Coltrane, two of jazz’s biggest stars, admired him greatly. “He was a hip dude to be with: funny, clean and intelligent,” Davis said of Heath. “Jimmy is one of jazz’s thoroughbreds.”

Yet it is startling that Jimmy Heath remains to this day a musician’s musician, more respected by his peers than known by the record-buying public. In his accomplished family, Jimmy has not received the sales or fame of his brothers Percy, a bassist for the Modern Jazz Quartet, or Albert, a drummer known fondly as ‘Tootie’. Even his son James Mtume has had more hits, as a funk star whose group, Mtume, came out with a popular disco tune, ‘Juicyfruit’.

Heath is undaunted by his relative anonymity, as he showed at the Blue Note, where he celebrated his birthday by bouncing and dancing along to his big band’s joyous, jumpy homages to such past jazz masters as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

A master at analysing jazz technique, Heath can perfectly render pastiches of some of the greatest jazz orchestras. On his composition ‘Ellington’s Stray Horn’, he copies the elaborate, dreamy romanticism of bandleader Duke Ellington and composer Billy Strayhorn, while he mimics Count Basie’s propulsive, piano-driven attack in his ‘The Basie School of AASE’.

The big band also revitalises some of Heath’s own popular jazz compositions, such as ‘Gemini’, written for his daughter, and ‘Gingerbread Boy’, a hit for saxophonist Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley.

Even his best songs, however, underscore why Heath never became famous. Adept at adapting other people’s styles, Heath has never had a clear trademark of his own. Ironically, Heath has also had so many pupils that his liquid, bebop-based sound is now more linked to his imitators than to Heath himself.

Although Heath’s playing includes much of the spirited, allusive flow of early bebop, it is also very obviously inspired by the genre’s bigest star, alto saxohonist Charlie Parker, known to his friends as ‘Yardbird’. When Heath began to play the alto sax in New York in 1947, at the age of 14, his style borrowed so heavily from Parker that he was promptly dubbed ‘Little Bird’.

His big band — which features such jazz stars as trombonist Steve Turre, trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater and pianist Barry Harris — comes most alive at yearly tributes to Parker staged on his birthday outside his old apartment in Manhattan’s Alphabet City, when the band takes on such Parker tunes as the theme ‘Yardbird Suite’.

But Heath’s reputation rests not only on his adherence to the lessons of bebop masters. The Queens College professor has also written a symphony in 1988, called ‘Three Ears’, and was nominated for the prestigious Grammy Award for his 1993 Verve album ‘Little Man, Big Band’. The title, needless to say, describes Heath perfectly: he may be small, but his sound is big.