Heath, Percy (Jr.)
Heath, Percy (Jr.)
Heath, Percy (Jr.), jazz bassist; brother of Jimmy Heath and Al (Tootie) Heath; b. Wilmington, N.C., April 30, 1923. He is famous for having spent most of his career (1952-74 and then on occasion during the 1980s and 1990s) with the Modern Jazz Quartet, but he is stylistically important for other reasons. For example, his distinctive walking bass lines behind Miles Davis and Monk in 1954 are among the first to use double stops as part of the line.
Heath began violin at age eight, and also sang on local radio, but did not become serious about music until the mid-1940s. He attended Philadelphia’s Granoff School of Music in 1946 while working as house bassist at the local Down Beat Club. In 1947, he moved to N.Y. where he was active playing with various bop musicians. From 1950-52, he worked with Dizzy Gillespie while also freelancing; in 1951, he joined the Milt Jackson Quartet which would evolve, within a year, into the Modern Jazz Quartet. After MJQ disbanded in 1974, he formed the Heath Brothers group with his brothers Tootie and Jimmy. He continued to work with his brothers and the revived MJQ through the 1980s and 1990s. The French Government made him an Officer of Arts and Letters in 1988, and the Thelonious Monk Inst. gave him their Founders’ Award in 1995.
—Lewis Porter