Lighthouse Café
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The Lighthouse Café is a nightclub located at 30 Pier Avenue in Hermosa Beach, California. It has been active since 1949 and was one of the central West Coast jazz clubs from the 1950s throughout the late 1970s.
A restaurant called Verpilate's was built at 30 Pier Avenue in 1934, and it was converted into the Lighthouse, a bar, in 1940. The club first began showcasing jazz music on May 29, 1949, when owner John Levine permitted bassist Howard Rumsey to start a recurring Sunday jam session on a trial basis. The experiment was a success. Rumsey became club manager soon after, and put together a house band called the Lighthouse All Stars. While the club also hosted visiting groups, the Lighthouse All Stars became a noted ensemble in its own right, which had among its guest musicians Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan and Miles Davis. The longest-running members of the Lighthouse All Stars were Bob Cooper (saxophone), Conte Candoli (trumpet), and Stan Levey (drums). West Coast jazz stalwarts Shorty Rogers, Shelly Manne, and Jimmy Giuffre were also regulars in the early days. It also became an important venue for recordings; Art Pepper, Lee Morgan, Cannonball Adderley, Don Ellis, Mose Allison, Ramsey Lewis, the Modern Jazz Quartet, The Three Sounds, the Jazz Crusaders, and Joe Henderson all made recordings there. The Lighthouse sponsored an inter-collegiate jazz festival late in the 1950s, and the competition's winners included Mike Melvoin and Les McCann.
John Levine died in 1970, and his family sold the club to Rudy Onderwyzer, manager and part owner of Shelly Manne's club, Shelly's Manne-Hole. Rumsey left the Lighthouse in the 1970s, and Onderwyzer sold it again in 1981. The new owners remodeled the club and mostly discontinued the jazz-music policy. From the middle of the 1990s jazz began to come back to the club, first on Sundays, then on Saturdays and Wednesdays.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Gioia, Ted. West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California 1945-1960 (Oxford University Press, 1992)
- "Lighthouse Café"/"Nightclubs and Other Venues". Grove Jazz online.
