At first glance, Playboys looks like a West Coast curiosity.
A cheeky cover. Two familiar names — Chet Baker and Art Pepper — front and centre. Recorded in 1956, filed neatly alongside other Pacific Jazz releases of the era. It’s often discussed in terms of style: cool jazz with harder edges, bop phrasing played under California light.
But that framing misses what gives the album its quiet gravity.
Most of the music on Playboys was written by Jimmy Heath — while he was in prison.
A record shaped by absence
Heath does not appear on the album. He isn’t listed among the personnel, and at the time of the session he was unable to play publicly at all. Following arrests in 1954 and again in 1955 for heroin-related offences, Heath was sentenced to prison and served several years, much of that time at Lewisburg Penitentiary in Pennsylvania.
What he did not stop doing was composing.
While incarcerated, Heath continued to write and arrange music, working with the prison big band and developing a body of compositions that remained grounded in bebop but showed increasing structural clarity and confidence. Among those pieces were “For Minors Only,” “C.T.A.,” “Picture of Heath,” and “For Miles and Miles.”
These weren’t sketches. They were finished works — tunes that circulated beyond their origin and eventually found their way into the hands of other musicians.
Playboys became the album through which many listeners first encountered them.
The session: Baker, Pepper, and a working band
Recorded in 1956, Playboys was the third collaboration between Chet Baker and Art Pepper that year, following The Route and Chet Baker Big Band. By this point, their musical relationship was well established.
But this is not a record driven by front-line ego.
Baker’s trumpet is characteristically economical — light tone, clean phrasing, a preference for melodic logic over harmonic density. Pepper, on alto, provides contrast: more bite in the sound, a sharper emotional profile, lines that feel slightly closer to the edge.
They don’t blend so much as coexist.
That coexistence is held together by the material. Heath’s compositions provide clear frameworks and strong melodic hooks, giving the soloists room to move without pulling the music apart. The tunes are compact, functional, and durable — exactly the kind of writing that travels well between bands and scenes.
Two tracks — “Minor Yours” and “Tynan Tyme” — are Pepper originals, and they slot in seamlessly. There’s no sense of stylistic whiplash. The album holds together because the writing, regardless of author, shares the same priorities: momentum, clarity, and swing.
A rhythm section that understands the assignment
The supporting cast matters here.
- Carl Perkins on piano
- Curtis Counce on bass
- Larance Marable on drums
- Phil Urso on tenor saxophone
This is a rhythm section built for function rather than display. Perkins comps with restraint, Counce anchors the band firmly, and Marable keeps the pulse clean and direct. Nothing pulls focus from the frontline, and nothing needs to.
It’s professional jazz, played by musicians who know exactly what the job is.
Why Jimmy Heath’s role matters
Without the backstory, Playboys can sound like a solid but unremarkable hard-bop date. With it, the album takes on a different shape.
These compositions were written under constraint — not romanticised suffering, but real limitation. Heath was physically removed from the jazz world at the very moment his writing voice was maturing. He could not record them himself. He could not tour behind them. He relied on other musicians to bring them into circulation.
That is what Playboys did.
The album functioned as a carrier. It placed Heath’s music into the hands of listeners, musicians, and critics at a time when he could not advocate for it himself. When the record was later reissued in 1961 under the title Picture of Heath, that function became explicit.
The name changed. The cover changed. The music did not.
The cover, the lawsuit, and the double identity
The original Playboys sleeve was unmistakably inspired by Playboy magazine, down to the typography and imagery. According to multiple accounts, Hugh Hefner objected and threatened legal action.
Rather than fight it, the label chose a simpler solution: the album was reissued under a new title.
That new name was Picture of Heath — taken directly from one of Jimmy Heath’s compositions on the record.
The choice wasn’t arbitrary. By 1961, it had become clear that Heath’s writing was the album’s unifying force. Renaming the record after one of his tunes quietly shifted the focus away from the provocative sleeve and toward the music itself — and, in the process, acknowledged the composer whose work shaped most of the session.
The reissue also came with a new cover: a straightforward studio photograph of the musicians, stripped of irony or suggestion. The track order was adjusted, with “Picture of Heath” moved to the opening position, reinforcing the album’s new identity.
Later CD reissues would alternate between the two presentations. Some returned to the original Playboys title and pin-up artwork; others retained the Picture of Heath name and cover. As a result, the album has circulated for decades under two identities — one defined by marketing provocation, the other by musical authorship.
What never changed was the music.
Aftermath and legacy
Jimmy Heath was released from prison in 1959, sober and determined to rebuild his career. His long-delayed debut as a leader, The Thumper, arrived that same year. From there, his output expanded rapidly — albums as a leader, sideman work, and a steady stream of compositions that would become part of the modern jazz repertoire.
By then, many listeners already knew his tunes — carried into circulation by records like Playboys, through the playing of musicians such as Art Pepper and Chet Baker.