A NIGHT AT THE HERMOSA BEACH LIGHT HOUSE

By Dick Williams, Entertainment Editor Los Angeles Mirror, Oct. 16, 1954

Some 400 people were turned away at a little beachfront jazz bistro in Hermosa Beach called The Lighthouse last Saturday night. Several hundred others, who arrived early, managed to sandwich themselves inside.

Now Hermosa isn't exactly the easiest place in the world to reach if you live in Pasadena, the San Fernando Valley or Long Beach. That's where many of these people came from.

And lately, the nightly fog along the coast has been as thick as spider webs in a haunted house.

What's the lure? Last night, I found out when I wandered down through the mists to the foot of the Hermosa Pier.

The Lighthouse is the home of an exceptional jazz group known as Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse All-Stars. In the last six years they have built the place into the top citadel of jazz on the south coast.

This sextet (a quintet on week nights) is a long jump ahead of most of the jazz squealers, howlers and blasters who rend the night from one end of L.A. to the other.

They operate in a long, low, oblong, dimly lit room with an informal, easy atmosphere for shirt-sleeve jazz. At one end are photos of Stan Kenton (most of this group including leader Rumsey are ex-Kentonites), June Christy and other artists. At the other is a green-lit clock and a couple of red glowing ship's lanterns.

Along the walls are a series of impressionistic paintings done in bas-relief with Plaster of Paris. They have such titles as "How Can I Understand You If You Don't Say What I Already Know Blues?" "Some Days I Feel Aggressive" and "Who's Got The Melody?"

Overhead, above a false ceiling of open crossed batting strips, are a set of four, newly installed, giant hi-fidelity speakers. Their mission is to carry accurate sound without distortion to every far corner of the room. They do.

The patrons sit in a semicircle at low tables around the small bandstand with its mirrored back, or on cushioned stools at the bar which runs the length of the room on the opposite side.

Very few patrons are from the Hermosa Beach vicinity. They're from all over the L.A. area. A great many of the UCLA, SC and L.A. City College crowd headquarter here, which may account for the uncommonly high percentage of classy, good-looking girls. The average age is in the mid-20s, but there are older and younger steady patrons.