LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
Three brothers on the same jazz record — Percy Heath on bass, Albert “Tootie” Heath on drums, and Jimmy Heath writing the charts, leading the band, and playing tenor alongside Clark Terry, Nat Adderley, and Cannonball Adderley. Cut in 1960 for Riverside, the arrangements were airtight, and the album was called Really Big! — which, for once, wasn’t an exaggeration. A French horn thickens the voicings with a color you almost never hear on a hard bop date, and Tom McIntosh’s trombone anchors the lower register with authority.
In this episode of Deep in the Stacks, we trace how Heath turned years away from the bandstand into some of the most precise writing of the era — big band thinking scaled down to ten pieces, built on a rhythm section that happened to be family.
THE RECORD
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jimmy Heath
The middle brother of Philadelphia’s remarkable Heath family, Jimmy Heath (1926–2020) was a tenor saxophonist whose skills as a composer and arranger rivaled his playing. After early work alongside John Coltrane in Howard McGhee’s and Dizzy Gillespie’s bands, Heath lost several years to a federal narcotics conviction — but he never stopped writing. When he returned to the scene in the late fifties, his charts were tighter than ever. His Riverside albums — Really Big! (1960) and The Quota (1961) — showcase a rare gift for making larger ensembles swing with the intimacy of a small group.
Heath’s sideman credits are equally impressive — he appears on Cannonball Adderley’s Quintet in San Francisco and played alongside Clark Terry on sessions for Riverside. With brothers Percy on bass and Albert on drums, the Heaths formed one of jazz’s great family units, recording together across decades. Jimmy continued performing and teaching well into his nineties, earning a NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship in 2003.
His legacy rests not just on his saxophone voice but on the dozens of compositions and arrangements that other musicians kept playing long after they left the studio. Explore more episodes.
SESSION DETAILS
Recorded
June 24 & 28, 1960
Studio
Plaza Sound Studios
New York, NY
Producer
Orrin Keepnews
Engineer
Ray Fowler
Personnel
Clark Terry — trumpet
Nat Adderley — cornet
Cannonball Adderley — alto saxophone
Pat Patrick — baritone saxophone
Dick Berg — French horn
Tom McIntosh — trombone, arrangements
Cedar Walton — piano
Tommy Flanagan — piano
Percy Heath — bass
Albert “Tootie” Heath — drums
WHY THIS ALBUM MATTERS
Really Big! matters because it's the moment Jimmy Heath stepped fully into bandleader territory after years as a sideman and arranger. The ten-piece configuration is unusual — bigger than a sextet, smaller than a big band — and it gave Heath room to write the kind of layered horn voicings he'd been sketching for Miles Davis and Art Farmer. The presence of both Adderley brothers, Tommy Flanagan, and Percy Heath (his actual brother) made this a family-and-friends date with serious chops. The arrangements anticipate the Riverside-era Cannonball Adderley quintets and even point ahead to Heath's later Heath Brothers work in the 1970s. It's the kind of "leader date that sounds like a workshop" that Riverside specialized in.
Side 1
Side 2
Riverside RLP 333 · Original mono pressing
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