Percy Heath didn't start out planning to be a bass player. He flew fighter planes training with the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II, came home, picked up the bass almost by accident, and within a few years was recording with Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. That's a fast rise for an instrument most people take a decade to get comfortable on. But Heath had good ears and better time, and in jazz in the late 1940s, that got you noticed quickly.

What he's remembered for, though, is the Modern Jazz Quartet. He joined in 1952 and stayed until the group effectively ended with Milt Jackson's death in 1999 — close to fifty years with the same three colleagues, John Lewis, Jackson, and drummer Connie Kay. That kind of longevity is almost unheard of in jazz, where personnel changes like weather. The MJQ played a controlled, chamber-like version of jazz, tuxedos and all, and Heath's bass was the thing holding the whole elegant structure together without ever drawing attention to itself. Listen to Django (1956) and you'll hear what I mean — Jackson's vibes float, Lewis's piano is spare and architectural, and underneath it all Heath just walks, patient and exact, never showing off.

That restraint was the whole point. Heath wasn't a soloist who happened to play bass in a group; he understood his job was to make the other three sound good, and he did it better than almost anyone of his generation. Before the MJQ settled into its long run, he'd already proven himself on dates with Dizzy Gillespie and on some of the sessions that became Birth of the Cool (1957), so it's not like he lacked for bebop credentials. He just decided that discipline was more interesting than flash.

Outside the quartet, Heath was one-third of the Heath Brothers alongside saxophonist Jimmy Heath and drummer Albert "Tootie" Heath — a family act that's rare in jazz, three siblings from Philadelphia all becoming first-call professionals. He recorded steadily with the Heath Brothers into his later years, long after the MJQ had wound down, proof he never lost the appetite to keep playing. If you want to understand what a great sideman actually does — not the guy you remember first, but the guy who makes everyone else sound like themselves — Percy Heath is as good a lesson as jazz has to offer.