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

Four 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.

It’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.