In the late seventies, my cousin and I, along with a gang of jazz aficionados, began frequenting a Montreal spot called The Rising Sun.
Into the mid-eighties, the club, a tired firetrap kind of place that you accessed by walking up a claustrophobic staircase lined in what looked like shag carpeting, was still the go-to joint for raw, real jazz. Everyone, and I mean everyone, played the Rising Sun, and just off the top of my head, I remember catching Art Blakey, McCoy Tyner, Joe Pass, Charles Mingus, and Dizzy Gillespie at that tiny jazz spot. But the story I want to tell you features The Heath Brothers—Percy and Jimmy.
My cousin and I were there to catch the show, and at their first break, we invited the two brothers to sit at our table just off the stage. They happily joined us, mostly I think, because there was nowhere else for them to go. There were no greenrooms, no backstage, no nothing at the Rising Sun and the musicians either stood by the bar, or sat with the patrons.
My mind still boggles, by the way, at the memory of that evening. I mean, come on, Jimmy and Percy Heath sitting at your table and talking jazz? Crazy, right?
As we chatted up the two brothers, someone said something that got Jimmy Heath to tell us a story that stayed with me forever.
It seems that the one-and-only Charlie Parker showed up at Jimmy Heath’s door one afternoon, asking if he could borrow Jimmy’s horn. Now the purists out there might mumble something about the implausibility of such a request, given that Jimmy Heath was known for his work on the tenor while Bird, of course, played alto.
I don’t remember if Jimmy had an alto sax kicking around (apparently he did start out on the alto) or whether Bird borrowed a tenor, but the important point is that Bird had a gig, his own horn was in hock, and he needed Jimmy Heath to lend him one.
And after setting up that whole backstory, Jimmy Heath went on to tell us that after he got the horn back from Bird, Jimmy was quite keen to get it out of its case, and play some riffs, just to see if, “Any of Bird’s magic was still left in the horn.”
And I’ll never forget the dejection in Jimmy Heath’s posture as he glanced up at us, and with a shrug, said, “But no, all that magic had blowed right through.”