Percy Heath

Percy Heath is remembered as the bassist anchoring the Modern Jazz Quartet, but before he ever picked up an instrument he trained as a pilot with the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II. The war ended before he saw combat; back home, urged by his brothers, he picked up the bass instead — the same hands heard here on the 1954 session for Roses Of Picardy.

Deciphering the Message

Makaya McCraven · 2021

Gigi Gryce · Thelonious Monk · Percy Heath · Art Blakey · Horace Silver · Art Farmer · Kenny Clarke · Cecil Payne · Jimmy Cleveland · Oscar Pettiford · Julius Watkins

Gigi Gryce Orchestra, The, Gigi Gryce Quartet, The · 1956

Bohemia After Dark

Cannonball Adderley With Horace Silver, Paul Chambers, Donald Byrd, Nat Adderley, Jerome Richardson, Kenny Clarke · 1955

The Jazz Message Of

Donald Byrd, Hank Mobley, Horace Silver, Doug Watkins, John LaPorta, Ronnie Ball, Wendell Marshall, Kenny Clarke · 1956

In the 1960s, as a sideman in Horace Silver's band, Joe Henderson said he didn't want to make Silver's music into something other than what Silver had envisioned — he wanted to make it even more exactly what Silver had envisioned. Long before he became known for his own singular voice as a leader, Henderson framed the sideman's job as service, not self-assertion.

— Statement stmt-joe-henderson-on-horace-silver

In 1941 the room where the new rhythm was being assembled was not being documented by any record company — the discs were cut by a customer who carried his own portable recorder into Minton's. That is the only reason we can hear Kenny Clarke, the house drummer, as he played then: the amateur recordings surfaced sixteen years later as Jazz Immortal - After Hours Monroe's Harlem Mintons (1957).

The earliest surviving Monk is not a studio date but a set of discs cut by an amateur with portable equipment in a Harlem club in 1941. They reached the public only in 1957, under Charlie Christian's name — Christian had died in 1942 — with the house pianist left in the small print.