Jimmy Heath

Mark Miller was born in 1958, lead singer and songwriter for the country rock band Sawyer Brown.

earl palmer was born in 1924 session drummer who was famous as being an early architect of rock and roll he backed up artists like little richard and fats domino jimmy heath was born in 1926 his nickname was little bird he was a jazz saxophonist and a composer and also a big band leader who was famous for his bebop contributions Johann Strauss II was born in 1825.

Austrian composer who was famous as being the waltz king.

He had songs like the Blue Danube, which I think I played in college about 80 million times.

And it's always trying to get my left hand to play these saxophone lines, which I think some people have told me that it comes out differently when I do it, as opposed to like a bass player who For instance, a really good friend of mine is a fantastic bass player, David Wong.

David is the regular bass player for the Vanguard band and he played with Roy Haynes and Jimmy Heath, tons of people.

And David plays great solos, but he's a bass player his whole life.

And I think it sounds a little different then it's purely saxophone ideas.

That's Blue Mitchell at the trumpet from his Heads Up recording from 1967.

And the tune was Togetherness, written and arranged by Jimmy Heath.

The tenor saxophone solo was by Junior Cook, Blue's frontline partner in Horace Silver's group.

Prior to that, 1960, with pianist Horace Parlin and his Speak in My Peace recording, we heard Borderline, which featured the Turrentine brothers, Stanley and Tommy, on saxophone and trumpet, respectively.

What could happen to me? It features Clifford Brown on trumpet, J.J.

Johnson, trombone, Jimmy Heath, tenor sax, and we have John Lewis on piano, Percy Heath, bass, Kenny Clarke on drums.

And we heard music from the divine one, the lovely Sarah Vaughan.

She gave us her vocalese version of an Earl Garner classic, Misty.

But they were known to be leaders who didn't tolerate drug use.

And in fact, Jimmy Heath, the late Jimmy Heath, was a lovely guy and a very funny guy.

And he was in Coltrane's band at the same time as Coltrane was.

And he told me that Dizzy came downstairs at a club they were playing once with a kind of green room type thing was downstairs and found them both injecting heroin.

It and in those days also, then they got arrested.

They spent time in prison.

Jimmy Heath spent time in prison.

And he said, I, you know, I can't believe what I did to myself.

All of those members of this quartet from Southern California, LA, and San Diego.

And before that, we heard, too, from Emmett Cohen's album Universal Truth, beginning with the Miles Davis composition, Budo, and that was followed by a Jimmy Heath composition that Miles Davis often played, and that one is called Gingerbread Boy.

As I mentioned earlier in the show, last weekend I had the opportunity to attend a great festival here in San Diego.

It's called the San Diego Tijuana International Festival, and it occurs over four days at four different venues in San Diego, Escondido, and Tijuana, Mexico.

I know he loved outlaw country films and stuff like that.

And Jimmy Heath lived here in Atlanta, actually.

And I would go to his house.

lived there.

Yeah.

His sense of time was really incredible.

When I started on the book, I remember the great, uh, jazz saxophonist Jimmy Heath saying to me, "Oh, Bing Crosby, I wanna read that." And I said, "Were you a Crosby fan?" And he said, well, he, he, he's a, he's an African American musician, and he says, "Well, Crosby was the only guy in the era," meaning the only white guy, 'cause that's all that was on the air, "who had time.

So that's where we got the songs from." And, uh, he, he never lost that ability.

I c- can I tell you a fast story about his time?

Um, at one of them, uh, the big band that was hired to accompany him consisted, you know, largely of young studio musicians who loved jazz, who spent all the time listening to Coltrane and Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis and so forth, and they had grown up hearing about Crosby and hearing their parents play him.

And, uh, the, the conductor of the orchestra, who was I guess about 28 or 29 at the time, was a tenor saxophonist named Alan Cohn.

Not to be confused with the great American jazz saxophonist Al Cohn.

Anyway, Alan Cohn, uh, he said during the break, the guys were all talking, this Bing is really something.