Albert Heath was born on May 31, 1935, in Philadelphia, the youngest of three musical brothers. His brother Percy, a bassist, was born in 1923, and Jimmy Heath, a saxophonist and composer, in 1926. Their father was an auto mechanic who played clarinet in a marching band, and their mother sang in a church choir. His grandfather gave him the nickname Tootie, a nod to the boy's weakness for tutti-frutti ice cream, and it stayed with him as his professional name. He took up the drums because his school band needed a drummer, was largely self-taught, and worked with the Philadelphia percussionist Charles "Specs" Wright. As a teenager he played at the Blue Note, a Philadelphia jazz club, accompanying visiting soloists; in February 1957, at 21, he sat in there with Thelonious Monk.

His recording debut came on May 31, 1957, his 22nd birthday, at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack, New Jersey, where he played on John Coltrane's first Prestige session as a leader, the album Coltrane, alongside the Philadelphia trumpeter Johnnie Splawn. That December he was in New York for Nina Simone's first studio album, Little Girl Blue, recorded with the bassist Jimmy Bond. He then worked with J.J. Johnson's group from 1958 to 1960 and joined the Jazztet, co-led by Art Farmer and Benny Golson, in 1960, replacing Lex Humphries; he is the drummer on the group's Big City Sounds, The Jazztet and John Lewis and The Jazztet at Birdhouse. In the same years he became a regular on Riverside sessions, with his brother Jimmy, Wes Montgomery (The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery, January 1960), Johnny Griffin, Clifford Jordan and Blue Mitchell, and he anchored a Bobby Timmons trio, with the bassist Ron Carter, that was recorded live at the Village Vanguard on October 1, 1961.

In the mid-1960s he based himself in Europe, mostly in Sweden and Denmark. He was house drummer at the Golden Circle in Stockholm, worked with the composer George Russell, and in Copenhagen became part of a rhythm section with the pianist Kenny Drew and the bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen that backed visiting Americans at the Jazzhus Montmartre: Dexter Gordon on July 20, 1967, Griffin, Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, and Sonny Rollins, whose September 1968 Montmartre sets were later issued as Sonnymoon for Two and In Denmark. He also played on the Kenny Clarke and Francy Boland big band album Latin Kaleidoscope, recorded in Cologne in August 1968. Earlier, in March 1963, he was in Tokyo for a recording by a quartet led by Charlie Mariano and Toshiko Akiyoshi.

He returned to the United States in 1968 and played in Herbie Hancock's sextet, appearing on The Prisoner (April 1969) and Fat Albert Rotunda. In December 1969 he recorded Kawaida for the O'Be label, his first album as a leader, billed as Kuumba-Toudie Heath, with Hancock, Don Cherry, Jimmy Heath, the bassist Buster Williams, Mtume and Ed Blackwell. From 1969 into 1974 he was the drummer in Yusef Lateef's working groups, heard on Suite 16, The Gentle Giant, Hush 'N' Thunder and the live 10 Years Hence, recorded at Keystone Korner in San Francisco in July 1974. His second album as a leader, Kwanza (The First) (Muse, recorded in June 1973), put both of his brothers, with Curtis Fuller and Kenny Barron, behind mostly his own compositions. In May 1974 he was back in Copenhagen, recording with Drew's trio, with Gordon (The Apartment) and with Anthony Braxton, on In the Tradition.

In 1975 he, Jimmy and Percy formed the Heath Brothers with the pianist Stanley Cowell; their first album, Marchin' On!, was recorded in Oslo on October 22, 1975, and issued on Strata-East. He left the band in 1978, after Passing Thru..., and Akira Tana took the drum chair until he returned in 1982; his later Heath Brothers albums include Brothers and Others (recorded 1983), As We Were Saying... (1997), Jazz Family (1998) and Endurance (recorded in 2008). After Percy's death on April 28, 2005, he and Jimmy kept the group going with other sidemen until Jimmy's death on January 19, 2020. In the years away from the family band he freelanced from a base in Los Angeles, recorded with Art Farmer and Frank Morgan on Central Avenue Reunion (1989), and, after Connie Kay's death in 1994, became the drummer of the Modern Jazz Quartet in February 1995, staying until the group disbanded in 1997. He taught at the Stanford Jazz Workshop for more than thirty years and gave clinics at colleges around the country.

In his seventies and eighties he led a trio with the pianist Ethan Iverson and the bassist Ben Street, recorded at Smalls in Greenwich Village in November 2009 (Live at Smalls) and then for Sunnyside on Tootie's Tempo (2013) and Philadelphia Beat (2015, recorded in Philadelphia in October 2014). He also produced and led The Whole Drum Truth, a drum ensemble that included Ben Riley, Ed Thigpen, Jackie Williams, Billy Hart, Charlie Persip, Leroy Williams and Louis Hayes. He moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2013, and in 2019 he was a guest on volume 3 of Emmet Cohen's Masters Legacy Series. The Jazz Foundation of America gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018, and in 2021 he was named an NEA Jazz Master, an honor his brothers had also received. Albert "Tootie" Heath passed away in Santa Fe on April 3, 2024, at the age of 88; his wife said the cause was leukemia.

Heath was a hard bop drummer from the Philadelphia school, and the word that follows him is steady: he kept time that swung without pushing the volume, and he described his job as finding his place in the band rather than dominating it. He named Max Roach and Art Blakey as models, and his brothers' record collection introduced him to Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Ben Webster and Don Byas. His range was wide for a straight-ahead player. The same drummer is heard behind Anthony Braxton's reworkings of standards, in the African-inflected groups of Yusef Lateef, on Herbie Hancock's Warner Bros. date Fat Albert Rotunda, and in the trio of Ethan Iverson and Ben Street, where in his late seventies and eighties he set the tempo. Obituaries praised his expressive, unobtrusive playing, and he appeared on more than one hundred recordings across seven decades. His own albums as a leader are few and personal: Kawaida and Kwanza (The First) are built around his own pieces, several with Swahili titles, and the Iverson and Street trio albums are programs of standards and originals played with the economy of a drummer who had been on the bandstand for more than sixty years.