Albert Heath
American drummer (1935–2024)
Albert "Tootie" Heath (May 31, 1935 – April 3, 2024) was an American jazz hard bop drummer, the brother of tenor saxophonist Jimmy Heath and the double-bassist Percy Heath. With Stanley Cowell, the Heaths formed the Heath Brothers jazz band in 1975.
Life and career
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States on May 31 1935, he first recorded in 1957 with John Coltrane. From 1958 to 1974, he worked with, among others, J. J. Johnson, Wes Montgomery, Art Farmer and Benny Golson's Jazztet, Cedar Walton, Bobby Timmons, Kenny Drew, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Herbie Hancock, Friedrich Gulda, Nina Simone, and Yusef Lateef. In 1975, he, Jimmy and Percy formed the Heath Brothers. He remained with the group until 1978, then left to freelance. He recorded extensively throughout his career.
Among his many workshop and classroom teaching assignments, Heath was a regular instructor at the Stanford Jazz Workshop.
Heath was later the producer and leader of The Whole Drum Truth, a jazz drum ensemble featuring Ben Riley, Ed Thigpen, Jackie Williams, Billy Hart, Charlie Persip, Leroy Williams and Louis Hayes.
Albert Heath died of leukemia in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on April 3, 2024, at the age of 88.
The public source identifies “Albert Heath” as american drummer (1935–2024). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Albert, Heath and American.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 28, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1370431. VIAF identifies the subject as 37102031. The Library of Congress control number is n82145591. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1935, 2024, 1975 and 1957.
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This entry incorporates text from “Albert Heath” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.