Lighthouse All-Stars Collection XVIII ★ with Art Pepper (I)

Art Pepper & Shorty Rogers

Complete Lighthouse Sessions

Nothing better illustrates this post than Ted Gioia's book, "West Coast Jazz". 

In the chapter "From the Lighthouse" — where he recounts the history of the cafe — there's a section titled "The dropping-off station", where he mentions this recording, comparing it to the first in the series released by the Contemporary Coast Jazz label:

The Lighthouse, for all its eventual fame, was a challenging — and often exasperating — jazz venue. The long hours were legendary, the quarters cramped and incommodious, the audience frequently loud and disrespectful. The musicians responded, however, with a positive energy that was often surprising, given the inclement surroundings. Jimmy Giuffre, Shorty Rogers, Shelly Manne, and other Lighthouse regulars later gained renown for bringing chamber music restraint to jazz combo playing, but the early work documented in their live Lighthouse recordings shows no such cool and controlled neoclassicism. These were spirited blowing dates with no holds barred, as rambunctious and unpredictable as the turbulent surf waves outside the door. Even Giuffre, arguably the king of cool understatement (he later mastered the technique of constructing a whole solo from an extended, pitchless, breathy sound), often worked up an uncharacteristic sweat when playing on Pier Avenue.

The initial Lighthouse album on Contemporary captured precisely this informal spontaneity. From the riff-like swing of the opening number, Jimmy Giuffre's "Four Others", to the crowd-rousing finale, an extended jam on the same composer's "La Soncaille", the All-Stars take off on the musical material at hand with considerable abandon. This band was loaded with arrangers, but its charts were mostly bare bones and at times even nonexistent. Hampton Hawes's noteworthy work on "All the Things You Are" is a case in point: There is no apparent arrangement or elaborate game plan here, just a quartet blowing its way through one of the oldest standards in the book. Yet Les Koenig found the results memorable enough to give Hawes a contract with Contemporary.

An earlier private recording of a Lighthouse session featuring Shorty Rogers and Art Pepper (later released on the Xanadu label) reveals an even more free-wheeling ensemble. In fact, the music recorded here might seem to be completely at odds with the personnel. Supported by a rhythm section consisting of Rumsey, Patchen, and Manne, Pepper and Rogers led a veritable West Coast all-star band. But the music taken down by Bob Andrews's portable Pentron recorder is New York bebop plain and simple. Tearing through "Scrapple from the Apple", "Cherokee", "Tin Tin Deo", and other East Coast standards, the front line was driving hard — and clearly driving under the influence of Bird and Dizzy. Here again the Lighthouse setting roused the musicians to a higher level of intensity than was their wont. The change was not always for the better — sometimes the Lighthouse performances took on a ragged quality — but the music more often captured an infectious spark that many of these musicians rarely matched elsewhere. 

This 1951 club recording isn't going to excite audiophiles — the quality is iffy, having been accomplished with a hobbyist's portable recorder — but for serious fans of saxophonist Art Pepper and the West Coast jazz school, it's a rare treat. Both Pepper and trumpeter Shorty Rogers had only recently departed Stan Kenton's Orchestra when they found themselves gigging with the group that would eventually develop, sans Pepper, into the Lighthouse All Stars featuring drummer Shelly Manne, pianist Frank Patchen, and bassist Howard Rumsey. Although many of the tunes are standards such as "Robbins Nest", "Scrapple from the Apple", "Body and Soul" and "Cherokee", the light, airy sound that would come to typify the West Coast school is already in clear evidence. Pepper, whose prior recording history had been limited to big band sides, proves himself a confident master in the small group setting, and this performance is among his finest. Trumpeter Rogers, who would later earn a reputation as a superb arranger and composer, gives an indication of what's to come with his bluesy "Popo". *Fred Goodman*

Of note:

There are two versions of this recording. The one presented here is the more recent 2001 edition, although it also includes the artwork from the original Xanadu Records release.

It should also be noted that the title "Complete Lighthouse Sessions" is somewhat misleading, since in 1996 Vantage Record Company issued another concert by the same two musicians, recorded only ten days after the performance presented here.

But that will be the subject of the next post.

1 - Popo

(Shorty Rogers)

2 - What's New?

(Bob Haggart, Johnny Burke)

3 - Lullaby In Rhythm

(Clarence Profit, Edgar Sampson, Benny Goodman)

4 - All The Things You Are

(Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein II)

5 - Robbins Nest

(Illinois Jacquet)

6 - Scrapple From The Apple

(Charlie Parker)

7 - Body And Soul

(Johnny Green, Edward Heyman, Robert Sour)

8 - Jive At Five

(Harry Edison)

9 - Tin Tin Deo

(Gil Fuller, Chano Pozo)

10 - Cherokee

(Ray Noble)

Shorty Rogers (trumpet), Art Pepper (alto sax),

Frank Patchen (piano), Howard Rumsey (bass), Shelly Manne (drums).

Recorded live at The Lighthouse, Hermosa Beach, California, December 27, 1951