Live at the Lighthouse

antenna

August 10, 2026 — August 16, 2026

Live at The Lighthouse was recorded on April 21, 1972, at the Lighthouse Café in Hermosa Beach, California, and released by Blue Note in February 1973. Grant Green leads a seven-piece group with Claude Bartee on soprano and tenor saxophone, Gary Coleman on vibes, Shelton Laster on organ, Wilton Felder on electric bass, Greg Williams on drums, and Bobbye Porter Hall on percussion. By this point Green’s music had moved well beyond the small-group hard bop settings of his earlier Blue Note records. The repertoire here comes from different corners of early-’70s jazz, soul and funk: Neal Creque’s Windjammer, Thom Bell and Linda Creed’s Betcha by Golly, Wow, Donald Byrd’s Fancy Free, Shelton Laster’s Flood in Franklin Park, Mose Davis’ Jan Jan, and Walk in the Night by Johnny Bristol and Marilyn McLeod. Most of the performances are stretched well past conventional song length; four of the six pieces run for more than twelve minutes. The expanded rhythm section is central to the record. Wilton Felder’s electric bass, Shelton Laster’s organ, Greg Williams’ drums and Bobbye Porter Hall’s additional percussion give Green a framework built around repeating grooves and long-form improvisation rather than compact arrangements. AllMusic points in particular to the difference between this group and Green’s other live bands of the period, where Idris Muhammad often occupied the drum chair. It also sits at an interesting point in Green’s career. Blue Note describes his late-1960s and ’70s work as increasingly rooted in blues and R&B, while his phrasing retained the single-note, horn-like approach he had developed partly through listening to Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. Live at The Lighthouse is one of the clearest places to hear those two sides meet. The original double LP also included spoken introductions by announcer Hank Stewart; later CD editions removed four of those introductions in order to fit the music onto a single disc.