Albert Heath, jazz drummer with boundless musical soul

Albert “Tootie” Heath, a jazz drummer whose intuitive style and precision licks backed greats such as Nina Simone and John Coltrane, and who later joined his brothers in recordings that became part of the jazz canon, died Wednesday at a hospital in Santa Fe. He was 88.

Mr. Heath had leukemia, said Beverly Heath, his wife.

Known since boyhood as “Tootie”— a nickname from his love of tutti-frutti ice cream — Mr. Heath was renowned as a consummate jazz journeyman with roots in the postwar bebop sound. Over seven decades, he ranged from free-form jams to mainstream jazz repertories and explorations of African rhythms with contributions on more than 100 records.

Among them were more than six albums with his older brothers, bassist Percy and sax player and flutist Jimmy. Their last, “Brotherly Jazz: The Heath Brothers,” was a mix of music, interviews and commentary tracing their early lives together in Philadelphia and their bonds with collaborators such as Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock, and Taj Mahal.

Mr. Heath, always the family’s main raconteur, credited his older brothers for encouraging his drumming when he was young. “I might have gone astray,” he joked on the album, “and become a doctor or lawyer.”

Mr. Heath also reached beyond jazz traditions to explore elements of African percussion, North Indian beats, and other rhythmic styles. In his later years, he took on a role as a mentor and educator for musicians.

“Stay open-minded, and you have to pay attention to other cultures and other music in order to be as good as you needed to be in the genre that you’re in,” he said in a 2021 interview with the National Endowment for the Arts after he was named an NEA Jazz Master, an honor also given earlier to his brothers.

Mr. Heath’s path to drumming began out of necessity. He wanted to play in the high school band. The only open spot was for a drummer, he said. Soon, he was learning to jam with his brothers, who had already made their marks in jazz scenes in Philadelphia and New York. “It seemed like my house was the capital of jazz,” he recalled in a 2005 interview with NPR.

One day, the American Legion post across the street from Mr. Heath’s home in South Philadelphia allowed his trio — Mr. Heath on drums and friends on alto sax and trumpet — to play. “It must have been awful,” Mr. Heath said. Someone tossed them 75 cents.

“And I realized, ‘That’s a quarter apiece,’” Mr. Heath recalled. “Hey, man, we can get paid doing this.”

By February 1957, the 21year-old Mr. Heath was playing with luminaries: sitting in with Thelonious Monk on piano and Jimmy Bond on bass at Philadelphia’s Blue Note in sets that included the Monk classic “’Round Midnight.”

Later that year, Mr. Heath made his recording debut with the saxophone master Coltrane on his album “Coltrane.” Next came a gig on the first studio album of singer and composer Simone, “Little Girl Blue,” in 1959.

Mr. Heath was back with Coltrane for some tracks on the 1961 album “Lush Life.”

In New York’s flourishing jazz venues in the early 1960s, Mr. Heath was in high demand for his ability to flow with different tempos and quickly find a groove with the bassist. Mr. Heath described the role of the jazz drummer as the moderator of the band’s conversation, making sure no musician dominates or pulls the music off course.

“Drummers have a big responsibility to be happy,” he said in an interview with jazz pianist Ethan Iverson, who played in a trio with Mr. Heath and bassist Ben Street in three albums including “Tootie’s Tempo” in 2013. “We think we need to make everything happen, but it’s not true. Everything is already happening, all you need to do is find your place.”

Just as Mr. Heath was gaining prominence in New York in the 1960s, he headed to Stockholm with pianist and composer George Russell as the house drummer at a club called the Golden Circle. For much of the mid-1960s, Sweden and Denmark were Mr. Heath’s bases as he expanded his contacts with musicians exploring styles such as European folk sounds and South African rhythms. He returned to New York in 1968 eager to sample more.

That led him to gigs with Hancock's sextet and a reunion with composer and multi-instrumentalist Yusef Lateef, who was fusing jazz and other musical cultures in what became known as "world music." Their collaboration included Lateef 's 1972 album "The Gentle Giant," a genre-mixing compilation that included a version of the Lennon-McCartney hit "Hey Jude" and Mr. Heath adding a flute cameo on the haunting track "The Poor Fisherman."

In 1974, Mr. Heath led a group of musicians, including his two brothers, in “Kwanza (The First),” an album inspired by his work with Lateef into various traditions including Swahili songs. A review by critic Andrew Gilbert on San Francisco’s public radio station KQED said the album reinforced Mr. Heath’s reputation “as one of the most eloquent and adaptable drummers in jazz.” (Mr. Heath’s first album, “Kawaida” in 1970, included African-inspired tracks drawn from civil rights and Black empowerment movements.)

“You become a jazz master by opening yourself up to other cultures and other music from around the world,” he once said. “The reason why I like to thank jazz — because it led me to all of these other types of music that exist in the world.”

Albert William Heath was born on May 31, 1935, in Philadelphia. His father worked as an auto mechanic and played clarinet in a Black marching band; his mother was a hairdresser who sang in a church choir.

His first drum was a gift from a relative who was a Philadelphia firefighter, whose station had a marching band bass drum in a closet. Later, his father bought him a modest drum kit. “So I had a snare, a couple of cymbals, and the bass drum,” he recalled in an interview with SFJazz Magazine. “I had enough equipment to do a performance.”

In the late 1990s, Mr. Heath was part of some of the last iterations of the venerable Modern Jazz Quartet before it disbanded. His next major project was the Whole Drum Truth, a percussion ensemble that included jazz drummers such as Sylvia Cuenca and Willie Jones III.

Mr. Heath was an instructor at the Stanford Jazz Workshop for more than 30 years and conducted seminars at colleges around the country. He also performed until recent months, often playing his familiar role as a band’s spokesman and jester. “Ladies and gentlemen, this next song is not a calypso,” he told a Santa Fe audience in October before the bouncy “Fungii Mama” with the Emmet Cohen trio. “Because I’m 88, it’ll be a collapse-o.”

Mr. Heath’s first marriage to a Swedish woman ended in divorce. Mr. Heath’s brother Percy died in 2005; Jimmy died in 2020. He leaves his wife of 50 years, the former Beverly Collins; two children; four stepchildren from his second marriage; nine grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Complete information on survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Heath and his wife moved to Santa Fe in 2013.

“Whenever I sit down to play, I’m quiet for a couple of seconds,” Mr. Heath once said. “Then I ask permission from the ancestors to allow me to do these things that have already been done.”