Jimmy Heath, jazz master and link to 1940s bebop era, 93

“When he walks into a room,” trumpeter and bandleader Wynton Marsalis once said of Jimmy Heath, “jazz history is made.”

Not only was Heath one of the most accomplished saxophonists and composers of his time, he was recognized as a living link to a dynamic period of jazz innovation, as someone who worked alongside Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane and other musical innovators of the 1940s and ‘50s.

Heath, who was 93, died Jan. 19 at his home in Loganville, Georgia, where he had lived for the past three years. The death was confirmed by his daughter, Roslyn Heath, who did not specify a cause.

Heath was part of a family of notable jazz musicians that included his older brother, Percy, the longtime bassist of the Modern Jazz Quartet, and a younger brother, Albert or “Tootie,” a drummer. Beginning in the 1970s, they often performed and recorded together as the Heath Brothers.

Jimmy Heath began his career as an alto saxophonist dubbed “Little Bird,” in part for his stylistic debt to the bebop master Charlie Parker, who was known as Bird, and in part for his 5-foot-3 stature.

In the late 1940s, Heath led a jazz band in his native Philadelphia that included future saxophone stars Coltrane and Benny Golson. He later joined a groundbreaking big band led by Gillespie, the influential bebop trumpeter Heath considered his mentor.

“Man, you cannot imagine what those years were like unless you were actually there,” he told Newsday in 1991. “Ideas were bouncing off everywhere at every jam session. You couldn’t wait to hear whatever Bird or Dizzy were doing and how it could inspire you in whatever it was you were doing.”

By the early 1950s, Heath had switched from alto to the larger, deeper-toned tenor saxophone to forge a musical identity away from Parker’s inescapable shadow.