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The Complete Live at the Lighthouse is an expansive collection that presents for the very first time all 12 sets of music the legendary trumpeter Lee Morgan’s quintet with saxophonist Bennie Maupin, pianist Harold Mabern, bassist Jymie Merritt, and drummer Mickey Roker recorded during their historic engagement at The Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, California from July 10-12, 1970. This definitive edition produced by Zev Feldman and David Weiss comes in an 8-CD set and a limited-edition 12-LP all-analog 180g vinyl set that encompasses 33 performances including more than 4 hours of previously unreleased music that lets the listener relive the experience of being in the club for every exhilarating moment. Both sets include a beautiful booklet featuring interviews, essays, and rare photos.
Mastered by Kevin Gray
LIMITED TO 2,000 PRESSINGS

An epic box set captures three nights of trumpeter Lee Morgan at his artistic peak

“So we’re just gonna go ahead and do our regular thing,” trumpeter Lee Morgan announces before the first of four sets on a Friday evening at the Lighthouse, a renowned oceanside jazz club in Hermosa Beach, Calif. It is July 1970, and Morgan and his working band have already been in residence here for more than a week. Now his label, Blue Note, has set up to record the final weekend of the run for a live album.
Surprisingly for a musician of his caliber, Morgan had never recorded a live album under his own name. And the stakes were high. He was already on his second comeback from a drug addiction that had nearly destroyed his career. That Friday night he could have eased into the first set by calling “The Sidewinder” or “Ceora,” beloved tunes that had made him a star the previous decade. But he had no intention of playing it safe. That became clear when Morgan opened with “The Beehive,” a complex tune by pianist Harold Mabern played at breakneck speed. Driven by Mickey Roker’s furious drumming, the band crashes its way into it and never looks back.
our tracks were chosen for the double album “Live at the Lighthouse,” released in 1971, a year before Morgan’s untimely death. An expanded three-CD set emerged in 1996. Now Blue Note has reopened the vaults and released “The Complete Live at the Lighthouse” (out Friday), comprising all the surviving recordings from that weekend engagement: 12 sets of music spread over eight CDs or 12 LPs.
t’s hard to overstate the importance of this epic collection, which was produced with meticulous care by David Weiss and Zev Feldman. Like Miles Davis’s Plugged Nickel or John Coltrane’s Village Vanguard sets, it restores to wholeness material hitherto available only in incomplete form. No matter how sensible the curatorial choices that guided previous versions, the music’s full sweep emerges only in complete form. What “The Complete Live at the Lighthouse” makes overwhelmingly clear is that Morgan had reached a place his earlier efforts had only hinted at.
That was due in part to the group he had assembled six months earlier: Mabern, Roker, saxophonist/bass clarinetist Bennie Maupin, and bassist Jymie Merritt. All top-flight players in their own right, by this point in the Lighthouse run they were operating on collective instinct — changing gears and shifting tempos as a single unit. More elementally, this quintet absolutely cooked, spitting fire and playing with a relentlessness that — as is clear from the full slate of performances — never let up. Roker’s thunderous drumming supplied the propulsion, Mabern’s rock-solid comping and Merritt’s perfect time provided the cohesion. Maupin’s playing — edging closer to the avant-garde than Morgan’s previous sidemen had — seems to push the trumpeter toward more exploratory realms.
The choice of material was daring as well. There were no standards, and Morgan largely eschewed familiar fare and focused on newer material composed by Maupin, Mabern, and Merritt, much of it significantly more challenging than the conventional hard bop tunes that litter Morgan’s Blue Note discography. Merritt’s “Absolutions” and Maupin’s “Neophilia,” both built on harmonically static grooves, get three performances each in this set; none is shorter than 19 minutes, with each soloist probing how far he can stretch the music’s boundaries. Morgan, whose technique could be inconsistent in his last years, brims with confidence, especially in burning tunes like “The Beehive” and Maupin’s “410 East 10th Street.” The complete set also gives listeners the chance to hear the subtle differences among tunes from night to night. Only once in this collection does Morgan opt for one of his hits: During the third set on Friday night, the band launches into the funky riff of “The Sidewinder” and, to the audience’s delight, proceeds to knock the cover off the ball.
Nineteen months after the Lighthouse run, Morgan was gone, shot to death by his common-law wife at an East Village jazz club. He was only 33, and the original “Live at the Lighthouse” was the final album released during his lifetime. It’s tantalizing, if agonizing, to speculate on what might have come next. What is clear is that “The Complete Live at the Lighthouse,” with its overflow of inner tension and joyful, headlong energy, stands as the definitive capstone to Morgan’s drastically shortened career. I doubt the year will give us a more important archival jazz release.

12 LP TRACK LIST

 LP 1 – Friday, July 10, 1970

Side A / Set 1

1. Introduction by Lee Morgan 2:06 
2. The Beehive 12:51*
3. Introduction 0:20
4. Something Like This 12:43

Side B / Set 1

1. Yunjana 14:28*
2. Speedball 4:34*

 LP 2 – Friday, July 10, 1970

Side A / Set 2

1. I Remember Britt 16:45*

Side B / Set 2

1. Introduction 0:19
2. Absolutions 21:55 *
3. Speedball 3:46*

 LP 3 – Friday, Jul 10, 1970

Side A / Set 3

1. Introduction 0:33
2. Neophilia 18:52*

Side B / Set 3

1. Introduction
2. 416 East 10th Street 11:46
3. The Sidewinder 12:49
4. Speedball 0:53

 LP 4 – Friday, July 10, 1970

Side A / Set 4

1. Introduction 0:30
2. Peyote 13:23*

Side B / Set 4

1. Speedball 11:55

 LP 5 – Saturday, July 11, 1970

Side A / Set 1

1. Aon 13:48

Side B / Set 1

1. Introduction 0:21
2. Yunjana 17:32*

 LP 6 – Saturday, July 11, 1970

Side A / Set 2

1. Introduction 0:14
2. Something Like This 11:46
3. Introduction 0:28
4. I Remember Britt 14:25

Side B / Set 2

1. Introduction
2. The Beehive 15:23*
3. Speedball 7:00*

 LP 7 – Saturday, July 11, 1970

Side A / Set 3

1. Neophilia 19:18*

Side B / Set 3

1. Nommo 17:44

LP 8 – Saturday, July 11, 1970

Side A / Set 4

1. Peyote 11:24*

Side B / Set 4

1. Absolutions 22:28

LP 9 – Sunday, July 12, 1970

Side A / Set 1

1. Introduction 1:37
2. Something Like This 15:39*

Side B / Set 1

1. Yunjana 16:07 

LP 10 – Sunday, July 12, 1970

Side A / Set 2

1. I Remember Britt 16:19

Side B / Set 2

1. Absolutions 19:35*
2. Speedball 0:27*

LP 11 – Sunday, July 12, 1970

Side A / Set 3

1. Introduction
2. Neophilia 18:59

Side B / Set 3

1. Introduction 0:46
2. The Beehive 15:11
3. Speedball 1:59*

LP 12 – Sunday, July 12, 1970

Side A / Set 4

1. Peyote 9:47

Side B / Set 4

1. Nommo 19:21*

• Previously unissued