Howard Rumsey
Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse All-Stars
Volume 3
In this long-playing set Contemporary presents the three basic groups of All-Stars which made The Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach the center of West Coast Jazz and a Mecca for jazz enthusiasts the world over. The notes which follow were written for Contemporary's ten-inch long playing release (C-2506) containing the recording sessions of July 22, 1952 and October 20, 1953. The third session of August 2, 1955 has not been released previously.
The key men of the first major group, Shorty Rogers, Jimmy Giuffre and Shelly Manne, after two years at The Lighthouse, left in 1953 to form Shorty Roger's Giants. (In the fall of 1955 Shelly Manne left the Giants to form his own group). The key men of the second and third All-Stars, Bob Cooper, Bud Shank, and Claude Williamson, continued for three years (1953 through 1955) and were responsible for such highly successful experiments as the flute and oboe duets (Contemporary C-3520).(...)
It was at the Lighthouse Cafe in Hermosa Beach that modern jazz first became really popular on the West Coast. Yet when Howard Rumsey started his jazz concerts there in 1948, the smart money said he wouldn't last a week. Hermosa Beach is more than 20 miles away from Hollywood. Who would travel that far to listen to modern jazzmen who were unknown to the general public?
Rumsey's plans seemed all the more hopeless since modern jazz was having a hard time in much more accessible places than Hermosa Beach. In order to develop, jazz needs devoted, understanding listeners. The all-important contact between modern jazz and a wide, enthusiastic audience had yet to be established. There had been many previous attempts to launch the movement, and they had all been partial or complete failures. A few years before the Lighthouse sessions, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker had played their new music in a Hollywood night club. They had been heard by a handful of musicians, and practically nobody else. In succeeding years, modern jazz on the West Coast became increasingly cultist and sectarian, talented musicians were experimenting in the isolation of their little cliques, and it seemed the entire movement would vanish with the inevitable crumbling of these ivory towers.
It was at this point that Howard Rumsey began his concerts at the Lighthouse. The most remarkable thing about Howard was his conviction that modern jazz could also be popular jazz, and that this could be accomplished without concessions or compromises. His policy was to ignore the meaningless divisions between the various modern jazz groups, to bring together the finest available instrumentalists and writers, and to transform the Lighthouse into a workshop where their music could be heard by large audiences. Howard's tenacity and his immense gifts as an organizer overcame both the incredulity of the musicians and the apathy of the public. Starting slowly, he kept working at his idea until he succeeded in having great modern jazzmen on his bandstand, and enthusiastic crowds in the Lighthouse to listen to them.
The Lighthouse is in a constant state of musical activity and experimentation. There are always new works in progress, new arrangements being tried out, new ideas for solos. Every musician on the bandstand is vitally concerned with communicating his music to eager audiences. The bored jazzman who condescends to play down to his listeners, or the unhappy jazzman who complains about being misunderstood, are both fortunately absent. The excitement at the Lighthouse is so contagious that some of the members of the All-Stars who had never written music before began to study composition and have developed into first-rate composer-arrangers.
*Nesuhi Ertegun (from the liner notes)*
A particularly impressive demonstration of the modern jazz School of Southern California (Hermosa Beach division). It's a five-starrer because this time the generally inventive writing aids rather than constricts the blowing. As usual, the level of musicianship is consistently elevated.
Side one (July, 1952) has Rogers, Bernhart, Giuffre, Cooper, Patchen, Manne, Rumsey (and Carlos Vidal on Zapata). The even better second side (October, 1953) includes Cooper, Shank, Rumsey, Max Roach, altoist Herb Geller, pianist Claude Williamson, trumpeter Rolf Ericson, and Jack Costanzo on two. Ericson has never sounded better on records, Manne and Roach are wonderful, Vidal and Costanzo help greatly on the south-of-Los Angeles scenes.
The diversity of the sides is also stimulating — from the tribute to the Mexican revolutionary through Giuffre's tender Somewhere and the mildly ironic rhythm and blueser Big Girl. Two superior frameworks are Cooper's Jazz Inventionand Giuffre's arrangement of Love Letters. I wish those two particularly hadn't been restricted to the conventional time limits. Engineers Val Valentin and John Palladino should get a bonus after this. I'd like to know what mike setup and what kind of mikes were used. *Nat Hentoff (Down Beat, February 10, 1954 [5 stars])*
1 - Swing Shift
(Shorty Rogers)
2 - Out Of Somewhere
(Jimmy Giuffre)
3 - Mexican Passport
(Bob Cooper, Bud Shank)
4 - Big Girl
(Jimmy Giuffre)
5 - Viva Zapata! No. 1
(Shorty Rogers)
6 - Mambo Los Feliz
(Shorty Rogers)
7 - The Song Is You
(Jerome Kern)
8 - Jazz Invention
(Bob Cooper)
9 - Snap The Whip
(Bob Cooper)
10 - Love Letters
(Young, Heyman)
11 - Witch Doctor No. 1
(Bob Cooper)
#1, #2, #4, #5:
Shorty Rogers (trumpet); Milt Bernhart (trombone);
Bob Cooper, Jimmy Giuffre (tenor saxes);
Frank Patchen (piano); Howard Rumsey (bass);
Shelly Manne (drums); Carlos Vidal (conga drums [#5]).
Recorded at Radio Recorders' Annex, Los Angeles, California, July 22, 1952
#6, #8, #10, #11:
Rolf Ericson (trumpet), Milt Bernhart (trombone [#6]),
Herb Geller (alto sax), Bud Shank (alto sax, baritone sax),
Bob Cooper (tenor sax), Claude Williamson (piano),
Howard Rumsey (bass), Max Roach (drums), Jack Costanzo (bongos [#1, #4]).
Recorded at Capitol Melrose Studios, Studio A, Los Angeles, California, October 20, 1953
#3, #7, #9:
Frank Rosolino (trombone); Bud Shank (flute, alto sax), Bob Cooper (oboe, tenor sax),
Claude Williamson (piano), Howard Rumsey (bass), Stan Levey (drums).
Recorded at Capitol Melrose Studios, Studio A, Los Angeles, California, August 2, 1955
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Why the subtitle "Lighthouse All-Stars Collection"?
Between 1952 and 1957, Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse All-Stars produced the core of their most significant recorded output: a series of studio and live performances that not only documented the ongoing activity at the Lighthouse Cafe in Hermosa Beach, but also fixed on record one of the most active modern jazz scenes of the decade.
During those years the ensemble functioned less as a fixed band than as a platform organized by Howard Rumsey: a stable nucleus with constant rotation of personnel, a permanent residency, and a repertoire in continuous development. Musicians such as Shorty Rogers, Jimmy Giuffre, and Shelly Manne passed through its ranks, establishing the Lighthouse as one of the central points of modern jazz activity in California.
Most of the principal recordings of this period — largely made for Contemporary Records — coincide with the years in which critical discourse began solidifying labels such as "West Coast Jazz". Heard today, however, these sessions reveal a language fully embedded in the broader current of modern jazz, in constant dialogue with what was simultaneously taking place in New York.
For that reason, and given that between 1952 and 1957 several of the group’s central "opuses" were recorded — including the volume presented here — Outlet Jazz deliberately takes a slight detour.
Without abandoning the collection of five-star Down Beat recordings, a parallel thread is inaugurated here: Lighthouse All Stars – Collection.
The order of presentation will not strictly follow the original release chronology. This first installment corresponds to Vol. 3, selected circumstantially because of its place within the five-star series. In forthcoming entries, the earlier volumes — Vol. 1, Vol. 2 — as well as the subsequent ones will be addressed, with the aim of reconstructing the group’s discographic sequence in full.
This detour is not a rupture, but an expansion of perspective — a way of observing the Lighthouse phenomenon in its historical continuity rather than exclusively through the filter of a critical rating.
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