Tootie Heath Beats Musical Path With Great Ones : The CalArts faculty member has made more than 250 recordings and played with jazz standouts here and abroad.

By ZAN STEWART

May 26, 1991 12 AM PT

<i> Zan Stewart writes regularly about music for Calendar</i>

On a recent Saturday evening, drummer Tootie Heath and some fellow musicians at Congo Square, the trendy coffeehouse on Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, interwove fabrics of rhythm on a variety of hand drums, with a distinctly African flavor.

And when Heath--one of the most gifted and inventive of modern percussionists--appears at Santa Monica College Friday, he’ll bring along trumpeters Clora Bryant and Oscar Brashear and saxophonist Herman Riley, and the direction of the music will be straight-ahead mainstream jazz.

Occasionally, Heath works with Macaw, a world beat group featuring drummers Khalid Abdullah from California and Francis Awe from Nigeria.

Three disparate musical paths, you say? Tootie Heath couldn’t disagree more.

“Jazz, R & B, world beat, Little Richard, (pianist) Erroll Garner, (drummers) Max Roach and Elvin Jones, (saxophonist) Sonny Rollins, gospel--I think they’re all connected,” says Heath, who has played with many greats from John Coltrane and Rollins to Thelonious Monk and Lester Young in his close-to-four-decade career.

Heath hails from a famed jazz family. His brothers are bassist Percy Heath of the Modern Jazz Quartet and saxophonist/composer Jimmy Heath, known for such classics as “Gingerbread Boy,” “Gemini” and “C.T.A.” He himself has made more than 250 recordings.

“I’m totally immersed in the African-American musical experience,” says Heath, referring to any music that draws on both African and American influences.

He wasn’t always.

As a youth growing up in South Philadelphia, a musically rich area that spawned such jazz giants as Coltrane, pianist McCoy Tyner and trumpeter Lee Morgan, Heath says it was part of his background to “know something about all African-American musicians, whether they be blues or gospel or jazz.”

But it wasn’t until Heath, 55, made a trip to Ghana in 1980 that he discovered the interconnection of African music and the art forms that had developed in the United States.

“Man, my whole outlook changed. I haven’t been the same since,” he says.

Culturally, it was like going home. “I had no idea of my historical connection with Africa. . . . It’s a country with which I have a history, a culture. I belong there somewhere. My ancestors were taken from there and brought here. I had to put all that in perspective.”

Musically, hearing African musicians play and playing with them himself, Heath opened up. “I started thinking more globally in terms of music,” he says.

“I started listening to the musics of other cultures, like Turkey, India, Brazil, Cuba. I traveled to a lot of these countries. I studied with drummers from around the world, like Sly Dunbar from Jamaica and Francis Awe. All of this made me more international, and I found I could bring many more types of rhythms into my jazz playing.” Turning the tables this year, he has just completed his first year on the faculty of CalArts in Valencia, where he taught drumming and the drummer’s role in a jazz rhythm section.

Asked about this last art, Heath says matter-of-factly: “The drum is the dominant instrument in jazz music. The drummer makes the group. You can have a good bass player and pianist, but if the drummer’s (not good), that’s the way the music will be. Basically, your role is to listen, paying attention to what’s being said around you musically. You have to know the song, and try to find a way to enhance the soloist, or have a dialogue with him or her. And you try not to play too much.”

The sounds of drums have been with Tootie Heath for most of his life. (His given name was Albert; he received his nickname from his grandfather.) He grew up across the street from the Lincoln Post of the American Legion and heard the post’s drum and bugle corps practice every Tuesday. By age 10 or 11, Heath’s ears were sharp enough to allow him to memorize the group’s repertoire for an upcoming parade.

“Then I started going to the rehearsals, and they’d let me beat a stick on a chair, and one day somebody didn’t show up, and I played and did OK, and eventually I got into the corps and did a parade,” he recalls.

Though the records his parents played, by the likes of Duke Ellington and Bessie Smith, certainly made an impact, Heath says his brother, Jimmy, was his chief influence: “It was like having a music school right there, he taught me so much.” He fondly remembers coming home to find Jimmy rehearsing with Coltrane, saxophonist Benny Golson and trumpeter/composer Cal Massey in the family’s living room.

At the age of 14, Heath bought his first drum set for $25, using money he’d earned shining shoes. His primary teacher was the noted drummer Specs Wright, who later played and recorded with trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Nat Adderly and pianist Red Garland. At 16, he was working in his first band, the Bebop Trio--across the street at the Lincoln Post American Legion hall.

“We got paid $7.50 for the three of us, and we couldn’t play anything,” he says with a laugh. “People thought we were cute.”

Heath’s musical education began in earnest in the early 1950s when he was part of the house trio at Philadelphia’s Showboat club. There he worked behind jazz stars who traveled the road without regular rhythms sections. The greats included Young, Monk, Stan Getz, Sonny Stitt and Kenny Dorham.

“I was with people where I was outclassed most of the time I was on the bandstand, and they were still so kind to me,” he says. “I learned so much.”

Heath ran into Getz a year or two ago and asked the saxophonist if he remembered playing the room in the early ‘50s, when he was co-leading a band with one of the first bebop bassists, the renowned Oscar Pettiford.

“I was about 17 when they came, and I was really nervous because Oscar was known to have a short fuse, and I knew that something embarrassing would happen,” Heath recollects. “But Stan was really nice and told me to relax. Well, I’m sure I was playing too loud or rushing (the tempo) because Oscar glared at me a lot, but never said anything. So when I asked Stan (recently), he said: ‘Sure I remember. It was the worst gig I ever had in my life!’ and we both fell out laughing,” Heath adds, laughing himself.

In 1955, the drummer went on the road with an R & B band led by Fats Noel and started making trips to New York City, where he settled in 1959. He played there with trombonist J.J. Johnson, pianist Cedar Walton and many others.

Upset by economic and racial conditions in America and particularly motivated by the death of Malcolm X, Heath moved to Europe in 1965. “Though I was scared living in the U.S. and felt I had to go somewhere where there wasn’t all this craziness, I also chose to go to Europe because I had been there with (pianist/composer) George Russell, and had liked it over there,” Heath says.

He spent five years in Sweden and four in Denmark, living in Copenhagen. There he worked six nights a week at the Club Montmartre, often in the company of pianist Kenny Drew (and sometimes Tete Montoliu) and bassist Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen. The trio backed such visiting greats as Rollins, Ben Webster and Dexter Gordon and made several records for the Steeplechase label, among them “Catalonian Fire” with Montoliu.

During the period, Heath found his playing reaching a new peak. “It was special,” he says. “I built up such stamina, endurance and technique on my instrument that I felt like I could play a marathon drum solo, on and on until they snatched the tune back.”

In the end, the Montmartre proved to be too much of a good thing for Heath--”I started taking it for granted, complaining about working six nights, complaining about not being paid enough, sending in substitutes”--and he returned to New York in 1974. Within a week, he joined pianist Herbie Hancock’s new sextet in its debut at the Village Vanguard.

With Hancock, Heath made “The Prisoner” (Blue Note). That album, “The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery” (Riverside) and “John Coltrane” (Prestige) are three of his favorite recordings.

Heath, his wife, Beverly, and their children moved to Los Angeles the next year, settling in Altadena. After a period of inactivity, he could be heard playing with saxophonists Frank Morgan and Buddy Collette and pianist Milcho Leviev in Los Angeles, and nationally with saxophonist Yusef Lateef and the co-op Heath Brothers band, with Jimmy and Percy.

Besides his drum work, Heath has appeared on television as an actor and works occasionally as a composer. His “Rain Dance” was commissioned by, and performed with, Linda Sohl-Donnell’s “Rhapsody in Taps” dance company, and he’s currently writing a piece for the Janine Williams Dance Company in New York. He also co-leads the group Katoomi with Leviev and violinist Karen Briggs.

Heath, who feels “grateful to be able to play and earn money at jazz,” says he has a few regrets in his life. One is not being on the same bandstand as drum greats such as Art Blakey and Elvin Jones.

“But that will happen,” he says. “It’s part of the African influence. There drummers play together, and I predict they will here too.”

Tootie Heath performs at 7 and 9 p.m. Friday in the Santa Monica College Concert Hall, 1900 Pico Blvd. $8. Information: (213) 452-9323.