Jazz Hot “en V.O.”

By Josef Woodard

Despite the tribute at hand, there was a palpable chill in the air at the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) Jazz Masters Gala last January, part of the IAJE (International Association of Jazz Educators) convention in New York City. The evening's function was designed to celebrate new inductees to a list of honorees, but the NEA's familial connection to the vastly unpopular Bush administration seemed to taint the proceedings, and boos could be heard amidst the kudos.
Yet when the Heath Brothers kicked into their mini-set, politics were quickly shoved aside. They had good reason to be there: saxist Jimmy Heath was a Jazz Master recipient in 2003, and his older brother Percy was toasted by the NEA the years before. Only the youngster, Albert "Tootie" Heath has yet to join the ranks.
More importantly, the heat, and quiet intelligence, of the music hovered over the packed ballroom and hammered home the message: politics will rattle global consciousness, but important culture will prevail, and help to heal.
The Heath Brothers have been cooking up their wares and contributing to jazz history for longer than any other family crest in jazz. At the center of the band sound is Jimmy, whose compositional life continues and whose post-bop fluidity on his horn belies the fact that he's now 75. What's age got to do with it?
Born in Philadelphia on October 25, 1926, Jimmy Heath came of age just in time to join the bebop revolution, and was so locked into the Charlie Parker style that he earned the nickname "Little Bird" (also in reference to his short statute).
He's been much more than a Bird emulator since then, working with Miles Davis, writing and playing in Dizzy Gillespie's big band, and many other settings, while also pursuing a sporadic solo career. The last significant entry in the Jimmy Heath discography was his big band album for Verve in the early '90s. His love of big band writing has also found its way into the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra operation.
Meanwhile, the brotherly connection has kept him busy, off and on, since they first started up a family business in the late '70s. A 1997 album on Concord is called "As We Were Saying...," the title of which gets at the sense of an ongoing story in the family. There may be gaps between albums and projects, but they keep resurfacing, reminding us about what's good and true in jazz.

Jazz Hot : You were a recipient of the NEA “Jazz Master” award in 1993. Was that a particular honor for you?
Jimmy Heath : Of course. It’s nice to be acknowledged among the people who are considered masters and people who I admired. It’s good to be in the company of people like that. Incidentally, my brother Percy had gotten it the year before, in Long Beach.

So now it’s Albert’s turn?
Yeah, it’s his turn (laughs).

The current incarnation of the Heath Brothers has been around for how long?
At least six years. The pianist, Jeb Patton, was a student when I was professor at Queens College. He was studying composition and improvisation, stuff like that. But his piano teacher was Sir Roland Hanna, who since passed away. He was Roland’s heart. He really loved the young man, and the young man was very much in love with Roland and his teachings, too. That’s why, on Percy’s trio record, he played the song “Century Rag.” We’ll probably play that. It’s Hanna’s composition.

But you’re not on that album?
No, I got fired.

(Laughs) Oh. Was that because of bad behavior?
No (laughs), Percy wanted to do a record with the bass being featured. We had done a lot of records over the years with the Brothers. We had more recent albums on Concord, and we had done some early in our career with Columbia, Riverside, Antilles, Island. So he wanted to do this one with the trio.

The band, as the Heath Brothers, has come in and out of focus over the years. I assume it’s one of those bands that can easily fall back into the musical feel once you started playing together. Is that true?
The thing about focus usually has to do with recordings. And right now, the industry is anti-instrumental jazz. They’re stuck on vocals and that’s about the size of it. There are just a few instrumentalists being recorded. My last success, other than the Brothers was Little Man Big Band, on Verve. It was Grammy-nominated.
I’m in the process of doing another one, but I’m doing this myself. I’ve already recorded six tracks and we have about three or four more to go. I’m doing that myself. I’m not waiting around for them to consider whether they want to record big band music or not. The companies are not even recording small group instrumental music.

You’re in good company. There’s a big movement of artists doing it themselves. It’s one way to go.
Yeah. We can get it out there. The problem has always been distribution. But I think we can get it now, having built some kind of a reputation. Being the elders of the music, and that are still performing should count for something.

When I’ve seen you recently, in New York and the Monterey Festival in 2002, I was reminded that this is a hot band. You’re not relaxing or resting on laurels.
No. We enjoy playing, and there’s a certain feeling that we have. You know, it’s family. It goes back to my mother and father. We have the same parents and everything. So we’ve got something that’s built right in, a connection. It’s a feeling, a family affair.

There must be a kind of rapport that you can’t have with other musicians.
You can have good musical rapport, but there is a certain feeling I get when we’re performing together that is a little special. There’s an added ingredient. It’s intangible. I can’t say what it is. It’s just that we’re from the same genes.

There are other sets of siblings in jazz, like the Jones brothers and the Marsalises, and the Eubanks brothers. What do you think of those connections?
But they've never really played together. Now, the Marsalises are very good together. They're famiily. They can be wonderful--they have it when they want it. But Branford and Wynton sometimes go their different ways, heading where they want to go.
But I heard them together, with Delfaeyo and Jason, and also Ellis, the father. That particular night that I heard them was wonderful. They had the same kind of family feeling (that we have).

The Jones brothers haven't played much together.
No, they never really played together. We had a thing at Monterey one year, with jazz families. Elvin and Thad played, the Turrentine brothers were there, we played, and also Jimmy Rowles and his daughter Stacy on trumpet.

Did you play together as youngsters?
Well, Percy and I played together before Tootie started to play. We played together in ’48, and went to Paris with Howard McGhee, at the first international jazz festival, with Coleman Hawkins as the headliner. That was a treat. The Slam Stewart Trio was there, with Erroll Garner and John Collins. Percy and I played together since the ‘40s. Tootie came in in the ‘50s. He’s about nine years younger than I am.

As the history went, the brothers might have banded together earlier except that Percy was a bit preoccupied, right?
Yes. Percy went with MJQ in the early ‘50s. We were playing together with a group called the Symphony Sid All-Stars. The DJ had a group out on the road. That was with Miles Davis and JJ Johnson, Kenny Clarke, Milt Jackson, Percy Heath and myself. Right after that group disbanded, that’s when John Lewis moved in with Ray Brown and Milt. Then Percy took over.
They were quite successful and kept busy for 40-something years, so we could only get Percy when he was away from the Modern Jazz Quartet. But during this same period, I was recording for Riverside. Percy and Tootie are on maybe half of those.

So you were already sowing the seeds for a brotherly group?
Yeah, within our boundaries, with him being out and me doing my thing as a writer. I could organize things. Paul Chambers and Wynton Kelly were on my first record, but the second one, I wrote a piece for Percy called “Big P.” He was on that. That was a tentet record. There are a couple of other sextet records. I think Percy’s on about five of them.

You taught at Queen’s College for ten years until retiring. Would you say you got your musical education mostly on the street, in a learning-by-doing way?
I’m an exception to the rule of the degrees from academic sources. I got my degree from being with Miles and Dizzy, Charlie Parker, and being around the musicians who play the music. My acceptance in Queen’s College as a professor was based on my reputation in the field, which is very unusual without academic degrees. An advantage to that is the world experience that you can offer students, as opposed to just the academic side. You have acquired a working knowledge of everything over a period of years.
It’s almost a better insight into just surviving in the world. You can learn your craft, but you’ve still got to survive. All of these things we’ve had to do to survive after we learned how to play, or while we were learning how to play, in a lot of cases, are important to the students who are coming to the institutions to study. The fact that David Baker or Kenny Barron or Rufus Reid, people who are performers, who didn’t get their degrees in colleges, but out here in the world. There are a few cases like that. I’m not the only one who was hired in the same way.

Those are impressive degrees that you have.
You know, professor wasn’t bad to have around all the time, or Miles Davis when I was with him, or Clifford Brown - although he was younger than me. Being around with Benny Carter and the masters, hanging around with Gil Fuller and Tad Dameron and people like that, who had done everything that you want to do. You learn from them. Gil Fuller would show us a lot of things about orchestration.
Of course, I had to take some lessons privately. I took private lessons on saxophone and in composing and arranging. So it’s not completely coming out of a vacuum. We studied, but not in institutions.

Was there jazz education of that type even available at that point?
Not much. Coltrane came out of the service and went to Granoff School of Music in Philadelphia. That wasn’t anything like Rutgers is now or Indiana or University of Pittsburgh is now. It was a different thing. I don’t think he did badly. The mentor-student tradition that we have works, if you really want it. You can make it that way. Sometimes, I think it’s an advantage to individuality. Universities usually turn out people sounding alike, which is not bad, technically, and they’ll work their way through it to find their own sound, eventually. It’s not a disadvantage.

Were there any teachers who were catalysts for your own education?
As a saxophone player, I studied with a man named Mr. Terry, an alto player in the Johnny Hodges style. That was when I was playing alto. Later, I studied with Paul Amati, who was connected with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Then, when it came to composing and arranging, I studied with Rudolph Schram at Carnegie Hall, and that was after studying with Gil Fuller and Tad Dameron. Gill was more of a teacher than Tad, to me.
I wanted to be able to write for strings. I had a mission to be able to broaden my scope, so I went to Rudolph Schramm, who was a Schillinger person. He taught at NYU for years. He taught people like Eubie Blake and Jimmy Jones and Mercer Ellington. So I went to him. He has passed on now, but he was a very important guy for me, in terms of explaining to me how I was doing what I was doing (laughs), so that I could teach somebody else.
I was doing some of the things before I got to him, and had written albums. But he helped me a lot.

So that enabled you to analyze what you were already doing?
Right. Of course, and enhance what I was doing. It wasn’t only analysis. He helped me to take it a little further.

You were coming of age right as bebop was fully in gear. Was it the tail end of at least the first wave of bop?
No. I was in Dizzy’s band in 1949, in the reed section with Paul Gonsalves and John Coltrane and myself. ‘Trane and I were playing altos and Paul was the tenor player.

Would you say you’re a product of bebop thinking?
Oh yeah.

But you obviously pushed it beyond that.
Dizzy says `if you know Jimmy Heath, you know bop.’ Those were his thoughts. I just did an interview about him coming out in a special edition of Down Beat, about Dizzy being my mentor. Bird was there, too, but Dizzy lived longer and he was more interested in big band music, composing and arranging, like I was. Charlie Parker was just a super player, a master player. But Dizzy could do it all. He could orchestrate for big bands, small groups, everything.

You switched from alto to tenor: was that partly to try to escape the Charlie Parker sonority and influence?
Yeah, I tried, but I didn’t. I don’t’ think many people can. If you’re playing modern jazz, you’re going to play some Charlie Parker ideas, or something similar. Charlie Parker and Dizzy and Monk were the creators of that music. As a teacher at Queens College for ten years, all my students are out here playing and they all have a little bebop in there.

It was really a major shift in the jazz language, wasn’t it?
Yeah, even when you’re playing funky jazz or hard bop, it still has bebop in it.

You wrote for Dizzy’s big band back then and did the big band album of your own ten years back. Is that an ongoing passion for you?
Oh yeah. Right now, I’m working on a piece on my computer, a commission from the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. That’s my third commission from them. I used to write for the Carnegie Hall big band. So I’m still writing big band music. I got addicted to that. While I was teaching at Queens, the Masters program in jazz performance, I always had a big band. That got me writing for ten years. I have about 50 big band arrangements, and I’m still counting.

It’s a lot of work, a labor-intensive medium to work in, isn’t it?
Oh yeah, and I love that. One of my passions is writing for big band and hearing all those instruments, all those textures and different harmonic possibilities. You can get a small band out of a big band, but the opposite is hard to do. You can’t get no big band out of a quartet.

Is there a kind of culture shock when you go from big band to the Heath Brothers?
No. That’s a different feel. That’s more about individualists, soloists. I still write most of the music that we play. I try to make it sound like a band. I get a pretty good sound out of a quartet, with arrangements.

You’re still dealing with separate voices, and work with weaving them, so it’s comparable in some way.
Oh yeah, but it’s four and not sixteen. Doubling, you’ve got eighteen voices in a big band. I love that.

The Heath Brothers - will they be working on any recordings coming up?
Yeah, we have a live concert that we’re listening to that we may release ourselves. We did it in San Antonio about three years ago. If that doesn’t satisfy us, we’ll go into the studio and do it ourselves. We’ll get it. It’s in the making.

As I look at the band’s history, it’s come in and out of the picture, but do you feel like it’s on a roll at the moment?
We’re doing quite a bit of festivals this year. We go to Europe - to Greece, Paris and all that. We’re supposed to go back to Italy in July. We’ve got festivals here, too. Newport, Mount Hood, Atlanta Jazz Festival, one in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, one in upstate New York. We’ve got about ten or twelve festivals to do. We’re going on a cruise in October, the Norwegian Sun Jazz Cruise. We’ve done that before, too.

So things are going well fore the band?
Well, when we get there, people enjoy what they hear. The problem is not having current material out. With Percy having his record out, and we still have some newer things. They’ve reissued some Columbia stuff. We have some product that we could bring, and distribute them ourselves.

As a writer, you would probably be more interested in perpetuating new material, wouldn’t you?
Well, I’m still collecting on some of the old stuff, too. I’ve written about 130 some compositions. I was fortunate that a lot of my peers recorded my music.

You obviously have the writing instinct. Is writing something you’ve always pursued as a creative outlet?
Yes, I’ve always loved it. I’m on something now, and I’ve got a sextet piece I just wrote for the Charlie Parker festival here in New York. I’ve got a couple of saxophone quartets that I’ve never had recorded or played anywhere. I’ve got lots of stuff to record, when we go in the studio. That’s all we got to do, get together and go into the studio.

Do you see the Heath Brothers as carrying a torch, in terms a historical tradition under the umbrella of jazz?
If you would put the bio together, Percy and myself have been on a hundred-and-something recordings. Tootie has been on at least that many. Percy’s probably been on 250. This is with everybody who was somebody or is still remaining in the world of jazz. We all played with Miles, we all played with Dizzy. Percy and I played with Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, you name it. The only people any of us haven’t played with were Basie or Duke. A lot of the other people - Sonny Rollins, Coltrane, Clifford Brown, Kenny Dorham, Dexter Gordon - we’ve played with.

The Heath family is woven into the fabric of jazz, needless to say?
That sounds good. That’s a good statement. I’ll take that one.

Jimmy HEATH (Jazz Hot 615) By Josef Woodard Despite the tribute at hand, there was a palpable chill in the air at the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) Jazz Masters Gala last January, part of the IAJE (International Association of Jazz Educators) convention in New York City. The evening's function was designed to celebrate new inductees to a list of honorees, but the NEA's familial connection to the vastly unpopular Bush administration seemed to taint the proceedings, and boos could be heard amidst the kudos. Yet when the Heath Brothers kicked into their mini-set, politics were quickly shoved aside. They had good reason to be there: saxist Jimmy Heath was a Jazz Master recipient in 2003, and his older brother Percy was toasted by the NEA the years before. Only the youngster, Albert "Tootie" Heath has yet to join the ranks. More importantly, the heat, and quiet intelligence, of the music hovered over the packed ballroom and hammered home the message: politics will rattle global consciousness, but important culture will prevail, and help to heal. The Heath Brothers have been cooking up their wares and contributing to jazz history for longer than any other family crest in jazz. At the center of the band sound is Jimmy, whose compositional life continues and whose post-bop fluidity on his horn belies the fact that he's now 75. What's age got to do with it? Born in Philadelphia on October 25, 1926, Jimmy Heath came of age just in time to join the bebop revolution, and was so locked into the Charlie Parker style that he earned the nickname "Little Bird" (also in reference to his short statute). He's been much more than a Bird emulator since then, working with Miles Davis, writing and playing in Dizzy Gillespie's big band, and many other settings, while also pursuing a sporadic solo career. The last significant entry in the Jimmy Heath discography was his big band album for Verve in the early '90s. His love of big band writing has also found its way into the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra operation. Meanwhile, the brotherly connection has kept him busy, off and on, since they first started up a family business in the late '70s. A 1997 album on Concord is called "As We Were Saying...," the title of which gets at the sense of an ongoing story in the family. There may be gaps between albums and projects, but they keep resurfacing, reminding us about what's good and true in jazz. Jazz Hot : You were a recipient of the NEA “Jazz Master” award in 1993. Was that a particular honor for you? Jimmy Heath : Of course. It’s nice to be acknowledged among the people who are considered masters and people who I admired. It’s good to be in the company of people like that. Incidentally, my brother Percy had gotten it the year before, in Long Beach. So now it’s Albert’s turn? Yeah, it’s his turn (laughs). The current incarnation of the Heath Brothers has been around for how long? At least six years. The pianist, Jeb Patton, was a student when I was professor at Queens College. He was studying composition and improvisation, stuff like that. But his piano teacher was Sir Roland Hanna, who since passed away. He was Roland’s heart. He really loved the young man, and the young man was very much in love with Roland and his teachings, too. That’s why, on Percy’s trio record, he played the song “Century Rag.” We’ll probably play that. It’s Hanna’s composition. But you’re not on that album? No, I got fired. (Laughs) Oh. Was that because of bad behavior? No (laughs), Percy wanted to do a record with the bass being featured. We had done a lot of records over the years with the Brothers. We had more recent albums on Concord, and we had done some early in our career with Columbia, Riverside, Antilles, Island. So he wanted to do this one with the trio. The band, as the Heath Brothers, has come in and out of focus over the years. I assume it’s one of those bands that can easily fall back into the musical feel once you started playing together. Is that true? The thing about focus usually has to do with recordings. And right now, the industry is anti-instrumental jazz. They’re stuck on vocals and that’s about the size of it. There are just a few instrumentalists being recorded. My last success, other than the Brothers was Little Man Big Band, on Verve. It was Grammy-nominated. I’m in the process of doing another one, but I’m doing this myself. I’ve already recorded six tracks and we have about three or four more to go. I’m doing that myself. I’m not waiting around for them to consider whether they want to record big band music or not. The companies are not even recording small group instrumental music. You’re in good company. There’s a big movement of artists doing it themselves. It’s one way to go. Yeah. We can get it out there. The problem has always been distribution. But I think we can get it now, having built some kind of a reputation. Being the elders of the music, and that are still performing should count for something. When I’ve seen you recently, in New York and the Monterey Festival in 2002, I was reminded that this is a hot band. You’re not relaxing or resting on laurels. No. We enjoy playing, and there’s a certain feeling that we have. You know, it’s family. It goes back to my mother and father. We have the same parents and everything. So we’ve got something that’s built right in, a connection. It’s a feeling, a family affair. There must be a kind of rapport that you can’t have with other musicians. You can have good musical rapport, but there is a certain feeling I get when we’re performing together that is a little special. There’s an added ingredient. It’s intangible. I can’t say what it is. It’s just that we’re from the same genes. There are other sets of siblings in jazz, like the Jones brothers and the Marsalises, and the Eubanks brothers. What do you think of those connections? But they've never really played together. Now, the Marsalises are very good together. They're famiily. They can be wonderful--they have it when they want it. But Branford and Wynton sometimes go their different ways, heading where they want to go. But I heard them together, with Delfaeyo and Jason, and also Ellis, the father. That particular night that I heard them was wonderful. They had the same kind of family feeling (that we have). The Jones brothers haven't played much together. No, they never really played together. We had a thing at Monterey one year, with jazz families. Elvin and Thad played, the Turrentine brothers were there, we played, and also Jimmy Rowles and his daughter Stacy on trumpet. Did you play together as youngsters? Well, Percy and I played together before Tootie started to play. We played together in ’48, and went to Paris with Howard McGhee, at the first international jazz festival, with Coleman Hawkins as the headliner. That was a treat. The Slam Stewart Trio was there, with Erroll Garner and John Collins. Percy and I played together since the ‘40s. Tootie came in in the ‘50s. He’s about nine years younger than I am. As the history went, the brothers might have banded together earlier except that Percy was a bit preoccupied, right? Yes. Percy went with MJQ in the early ‘50s. We were playing together with a group called the Symphony Sid All-Stars. The DJ had a group out on the road. That was with Miles Davis and JJ Johnson, Kenny Clarke, Milt Jackson, Percy Heath and myself. Right after that group disbanded, that’s when John Lewis moved in with Ray Brown and Milt. Then Percy took over. They were quite successful and kept busy for 40-something years, so we could only get Percy when he was away from the Modern Jazz Quartet. But during this same period, I was recording for Riverside. Percy and Tootie are on maybe half of those. So you were already sowing the seeds for a brotherly group? Yeah, within our boundaries, with him being out and me doing my thing as a writer. I could organize things. Paul Chambers and Wynton Kelly were on my first record, but the second one, I wrote a piece for Percy called “Big P.” He was on that. That was a tentet record. There are a couple of other sextet records. I think Percy’s on about five of them. You taught at Queen’s College for ten years until retiring. Would you say you got your musical education mostly on the street, in a learning-by-doing way? I’m an exception to the rule of the degrees from academic sources. I got my degree from being with Miles and Dizzy, Charlie Parker, and being around the musicians who play the music. My acceptance in Queen’s College as a professor was based on my reputation in the field, which is very unusual without academic degrees. An advantage to that is the world experience that you can offer students, as opposed to just the academic side. You have acquired a working knowledge of everything over a period of years. It’s almost a better insight into just surviving in the world. You can learn your craft, but you’ve still got to survive. All of these things we’ve had to do to survive after we learned how to play, or while we were learning how to play, in a lot of cases, are important to the students who are coming to the institutions to study. The fact that David Baker or Kenny Barron or Rufus Reid, people who are performers, who didn’t get their degrees in colleges, but out here in the world. There are a few cases like that. I’m not the only one who was hired in the same way. Those are impressive degrees that you have. You know, professor wasn’t bad to have around all the time, or Miles Davis when I was with him, or Clifford Brown - although he was younger than me. Being around with Benny Carter and the masters, hanging around with Gil Fuller and Tad Dameron and people like that, who had done everything that you want to do. You learn from them. Gil Fuller would show us a lot of things about orchestration. Of course, I had to take some lessons privately. I took private lessons on saxophone and in composing and arranging. So it’s not completely coming out of a vacuum. We studied, but not in institutions. Was there jazz education of that type even available at that point? Not much. Coltrane came out of the service and went to Granoff School of Music in Philadelphia. That wasn’t anything like Rutgers is now or Indiana or University of Pittsburgh is now. It was a different thing. I don’t think he did badly. The mentor-student tradition that we have works, if you really want it. You can make it that way. Sometimes, I think it’s an advantage to individuality. Universities usually turn out people sounding alike, which is not bad, technically, and they’ll work their way through it to find their own sound, eventually. It’s not a disadvantage. Were there any teachers who were catalysts for your own education? As a saxophone player, I studied with a man named Mr. Terry, an alto player in the Johnny Hodges style. That was when I was playing alto. Later, I studied with Paul Amati, who was connected with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Then, when it came to composing and arranging, I studied with Rudolph Schram at Carnegie Hall, and that was after studying with Gil Fuller and Tad Dameron. Gill was more of a teacher than Tad, to me. I wanted to be able to write for strings. I had a mission to be able to broaden my scope, so I went to Rudolph Schramm, who was a Schillinger person. He taught at NYU for years. He taught people like Eubie Blake and Jimmy Jones and Mercer Ellington. So I went to him. He has passed on now, but he was a very important guy for me, in terms of explaining to me how I was doing what I was doing (laughs), so that I could teach somebody else. I was doing some of the things before I got to him, and had written albums. But he helped me a lot. So that enabled you to analyze what you were already doing? Right. Of course, and enhance what I was doing. It wasn’t only analysis. He helped me to take it a little further. You were coming of age right as bebop was fully in gear. Was it the tail end of at least the first wave of bop? No. I was in Dizzy’s band in 1949, in the reed section with Paul Gonsalves and John Coltrane and myself. ‘Trane and I were playing altos and Paul was the tenor player. Would you say you’re a product of bebop thinking? Oh yeah. But you obviously pushed it beyond that. Dizzy says `if you know Jimmy Heath, you know bop.’ Those were his thoughts. I just did an interview about him coming out in a special edition of Down Beat, about Dizzy being my mentor. Bird was there, too, but Dizzy lived longer and he was more interested in big band music, composing and arranging, like I was. Charlie Parker was just a super player, a master player. But Dizzy could do it all. He could orchestrate for big bands, small groups, everything. You switched from alto to tenor: was that partly to try to escape the Charlie Parker sonority and influence? Yeah, I tried, but I didn’t. I don’t’ think many people can. If you’re playing modern jazz, you’re going to play some Charlie Parker ideas, or something similar. Charlie Parker and Dizzy and Monk were the creators of that music. As a teacher at Queens College for ten years, all my students are out here playing and they all have a little bebop in there. It was really a major shift in the jazz language, wasn’t it? Yeah, even when you’re playing funky jazz or hard bop, it still has bebop in it. You wrote for Dizzy’s big band back then and did the big band album of your own ten years back. Is that an ongoing passion for you? Oh yeah. Right now, I’m working on a piece on my computer, a commission from the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. That’s my third commission from them. I used to write for the Carnegie Hall big band. So I’m still writing big band music. I got addicted to that. While I was teaching at Queens, the Masters program in jazz performance, I always had a big band. That got me writing for ten years. I have about 50 big band arrangements, and I’m still counting. It’s a lot of work, a labor-intensive medium to work in, isn’t it? Oh yeah, and I love that. One of my passions is writing for big band and hearing all those instruments, all those textures and different harmonic possibilities. You can get a small band out of a big band, but the opposite is hard to do. You can’t get no big band out of a quartet. Is there a kind of culture shock when you go from big band to the Heath Brothers? No. That’s a different feel. That’s more about individualists, soloists. I still write most of the music that we play. I try to make it sound like a band. I get a pretty good sound out of a quartet, with arrangements. You’re still dealing with separate voices, and work with weaving them, so it’s comparable in some way. Oh yeah, but it’s four and not sixteen. Doubling, you’ve got eighteen voices in a big band. I love that. The Heath Brothers - will they be working on any recordings coming up? Yeah, we have a live concert that we’re listening to that we may release ourselves. We did it in San Antonio about three years ago. If that doesn’t satisfy us, we’ll go into the studio and do it ourselves. We’ll get it. It’s in the making. As I look at the band’s history, it’s come in and out of the picture, but do you feel like it’s on a roll at the moment? We’re doing quite a bit of festivals this year. We go to Europe - to Greece, Paris and all that. We’re supposed to go back to Italy in July. We’ve got festivals here, too. Newport, Mount Hood, Atlanta Jazz Festival, one in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, one in upstate New York. We’ve got about ten or twelve festivals to do. We’re going on a cruise in October, the Norwegian Sun Jazz Cruise. We’ve done that before, too. So things are going well fore the band? Well, when we get there, people enjoy what they hear. The problem is not having current material out. With Percy having his record out, and we still have some newer things. They’ve reissued some Columbia stuff. We have some product that we could bring, and distribute them ourselves. As a writer, you would probably be more interested in perpetuating new material, wouldn’t you? Well, I’m still collecting on some of the old stuff, too. I’ve written about 130 some compositions. I was fortunate that a lot of my peers recorded my music. You obviously have the writing instinct. Is writing something you’ve always pursued as a creative outlet? Yes, I’ve always loved it. I’m on something now, and I’ve got a sextet piece I just wrote for the Charlie Parker festival here in New York. I’ve got a couple of saxophone quartets that I’ve never had recorded or played anywhere. I’ve got lots of stuff to record, when we go in the studio. That’s all we got to do, get together and go into the studio. Do you see the Heath Brothers as carrying a torch, in terms a historical tradition under the umbrella of jazz? If you would put the bio together, Percy and myself have been on a hundred-and-something recordings. Tootie has been on at least that many. Percy’s probably been on 250. This is with everybody who was somebody or is still remaining in the world of jazz. We all played with Miles, we all played with Dizzy. Percy and I played with Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, you name it. The only people any of us haven’t played with were Basie or Duke. A lot of the other people - Sonny Rollins, Coltrane, Clifford Brown, Kenny Dorham, Dexter Gordon - we’ve played with. The Heath family is woven into the fabric of jazz, needless to say? That sounds good. That’s a good statement. I’ll take that one.