RE: RTF live-- I’m a few years older than you (67) and my first exposure to anything connected to Jazz was in 1972, when I first heard "The Inner Mounting Flame". The first track I heard was, if I remember correctly, "The Dance of Maya", which definitely blew my mind. But it didn’t inspire me to explore Jazz. That began about five years later and once started, pretty much snowballed. I wish I could find another genre to explore that stimulated me as much as my exploration of Jazz but I don’t think it’s gonna happen, at this point.
I heard the Heath Brothers (all three) when they still had Stanley Cowell on piano and have a few Jimmy Heath cds in my collection.