If you know the name Jimmy Heath at all, you probably know it from the credits. He wrote "Gingerbread Boy," which Miles Davis recorded on Miles Smiles (1967), and "CTA," which plenty of bebop players still call at jam sessions without necessarily knowing who wrote it. That's the Jimmy Heath story in miniature — a guy whose fingerprints are all over modern jazz, even when his own name isn't the one on the marquee.

He came up in Philadelphia in the 1940s, young enough to catch the first wave of bebop live and smart enough to absorb it fast. He played alto first and sounded so much like Charlie Parker that people started calling him "Little Bird," which is a compliment and also kind of a trap — eventually he switched to tenor partly to find his own sound instead of chasing someone else's. He did a stretch with Dizzy Gillespie's big band in the late forties, which is where he really learned arranging, a skill that ended up mattering as much to his career as his horn playing.

The fifties were rough for personal reasons — a drug conviction cost him years of his career and his freedom — but he came back in the sixties with a run of records for Riverside that still hold up: The Thumper (1959), Really Big! (1960), Swamp Seed (1963). These aren't flashy albums. They're the work of a composer-arranger who happens to also be a terrific saxophonist, full of tight ensemble writing and tunes built to last rather than just impress. Listen to his tenor sound and you hear something warm and conversational, less about speed than about phrasing — he always sounds like he's talking to you, not at you.

Heath came from a musical family, and eventually that became literal: he, his brother Percy Heath on bass, and his brother Albert "Tootie" Heath on drums formed the Heath Brothers in the 1970s, one of the rare times three actual siblings made genuinely good jazz together instead of just a nice story for the liner notes. Jimmy also taught for decades at Queens College, which meant his ideas about harmony and arranging got passed directly to students instead of just sitting on records. He kept composing and playing into his nineties, closing things out with Turn Up the Heath (2020), released right around the time he passed. Not every musician gets to end on their own terms like that. He did.