The phone rings at the number listed on the website for booking and general info.
A woman answers, friendly, not like a receptionist, but a woman answering the phone in her own home.
“I’m trying to reach Jimmy Heath?” explaining that I’m calling from Bowling Green, Ohio.
She knows the score, and calls out.
Momentarily, Jimmy Heath picks up the receiver.
Jazz history is on the line.
Heath, is a saxophonist, composer and arranger. He’s famously short of stature and still welterweight
fighting trim.
His current nickname for himself is Keyboard Shorty, because a piano has 88 keys, and he’s 88.
Still the musician who called one project the Little Man Big Band cast a long shadow over jazz.
He broke through in the early 1950s known as Little Bird, a tribute to his size and love of the music of
Charlie “Bird” Parker, and has forged a career ever since, as a soloist, sideman and member of the band
The Heath Brothers with brother Percy Heath, the late bass player who made his mark with the Modern Jazz
Quartet, and at times younger brother Albert “Tootie” Heath, a widely recorded drummer.
Heath has played and written for Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, just the tip of a list that reads like
the index of a jazz history.
Now well into his ninth decade, Heath is still actively performing and as important spreading the legacy
of the music he loves.
“We’ve got to keep it going,” Heath said. “It’s American classical music.”
So this jazz elder spends much of his time working with the new generation of musicians on college
campuses, and next week he’ll be here at Bowling Green State University.
Being invited is “always an honor and privilege,” he said. He appreciates the work of the “great
teachers” who perpetuate jazz.
Heath includes David Bixler, director of jazz studies at BGSU. He said he first heard Bixler at a tribute
to one of the founders of jazz education, David Baker. The performers were all former students of Baker,
who teaches at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University.
“Each one was so strong individually and as a group,” Heath said.
That “as a group,” part is important to Heath.
“I like to organize the music and have the ensemble and then the freedom of improvisation,” he said.
While he spent much of his career working with small groups, those often featured tight, distinctive
ensemble sections.
It may be one of his tunes such as “Gingerbread Boy,” “C.T.A.” or “Gemini,” that have become jazz
standards. Or it may be the traditional Christmas carol “O Little Town of Bethlehem” which he reworked
for a Columbia holiday album as “Our Little Town” into a hip swing tune played by The Heath Brothers.

He is devoted to the big band.
Jazz composers will on occasion get to write for choirs and strings, but the big band is the orchestra
for jazz, he said.
“There’s a certain sound you get out of that instrumentation,” he said.
BGSU students will get an ample sampling of his approach during his time on campus. He’s sent Bixler
about a half dozen charts from the about 60 he’s written.
The Jazz Lab Band I, led by Bixler, will perform the music at a concert Jan. 29 at 8 p.m. in Kobacker
Hall. A few hours before, Heath will help them hone their performance during a rehearsal.
While on campus he also will lead an improvisation master class on Jan. 28 and jam later that night with
the jazz faculty at One 49 North in downtown Bowling Green. On Jan. 29 he’ll give a talk on his career.

In all of this he will promote the importance of individuality. “Everybody has their time and place
within a composition to tell their life story or whatever they’ve learned musically,” Heath said. “It’s
democracy at its best.”