‘The Complete Freddie Hubbard Blue Note & Impulse Studio Sessions’ (Mosaic Records)

Freddie Hubbard was one of the most exciting and dynamic jazz trumpeters to emerge from an entire generation of exciting and dynamic trumpeters. The competition was steep, not to mention ferocious.  

As Bob Blumenthal points out in the very helpful notes to the new boxed set, “The Complete Freddie Hubbard Blue Note & Impulse Studio Sessions,” between April and July 1938, three of the greatest trumpet men in the entire history of the music were born: Hubbard, Booker Little, and Lee Morgan. The argument has been made that Hubbard, who died in 2008, was consistently the most imaginative, creative, and powerful of them all.  

Given that collective opinion, one would expect that the standout feature of this package containing his earliest (and, many would say, best) music as a leader would be the trumpet solos. Indeed, the trumpet playing in this collection is beyond marvelous, but the first thing our ears are drawn to is the playing of the collective: the arrangements, the original compositions, and the ensembles.  

This set is about Hubbard as a highly practiced, even-handed, and consistently brilliant composer and bandleader even more than it is about Hubbard the firebrand trumpeter. This is somewhat ironic, because for most of these years, Hubbard was not usually leading his own bands other than in these studio contexts. 

His day job, as it were, was as a sideman with more established groups, such as drummer Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. He was also actively freelancing with a wide range of leaders on all sides of the aisle, from Ornette Coleman, Eric Dophy, and John Coltrane to Quincy Jones.

This latest Mosaic package includes the contents of 13 full albums — 11 for Blue Note and two for Impulse — contained on seven CDs, along with excellent and comprehensive notes by Mr. Blumenthal.

Even the title of Hubbard’s first album as a leader, “Open Sesame” portends that great things are just about to start happening. That 1960 album has only one composition by the trumpeter himself, a piece in a highly original form (not quite a blues) titled “Hub’s Nub,” along with two by the co-star tenor saxophonist, Tina Brooks. There are also three standards that provide a key first glimpse of how the young leader is going to put music together. 

He takes one love song, “All or Nothing At All,” and transforms it into a hard bop number, catching us off guard with a rubato piano intro by McCoy Tyner before zinging into an exuberantly fast rendition. Here he makes a familiar melody into something altogether new without fundamentally distorting the recognizable tune. He plays another ballad, Jimmy Van Heusen’s “But Beautiful,” at its customary romantic tempo, and shows that even at this young age he’s already a remarkable player of slow love songs — to contend with Clifford Brown, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis.  

There’s also a reworking of the rhythm-and-blues perennial “One Mint Julep.” It opens with a folksy prelude that anticipates “Hoe Down,” which he would play on Oliver Nelson’s classic album “Blues and the Abstract Truth” a few months later and, in general, could serve as an example of what would we would later call “soul jazz” at its absolute purest.

The 1964 album “Breaking Point” shows Hubbard moving far away from the hard bop/soul jazz model toward something much more heavily informed by free and modal jazz, roughly contemporaneously with the Miles Davis Quintet with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. 

Mr. Shorter is a key player on three of the albums here, especially on Hubbard’s 1964 Impulse release, “The Body and The Soul.” This is a remarkable album that makes use of the greater resources at this label, a subsidiary of a mainstream pop record corporation (ABC Paramount) rather than strictly an independent like Blue Note. There are three tracks with a string orchestra and four more with a full big band, all arranged and conducted by Mr. Shorter.  

Where, in other sessions, a slow love song like the Tchaikovsky-inspired “Full Moon and Empty Arms” becomes bright and bouncy, here, a 1941 Duke Ellington dance number, “The Chocolate Shake,” sounds like an avant-garde jazz ballet. It could have been composed by Gil Evans, perhaps, for Martha Graham. 

The last album, “Blue Spirits” (1965) is essentially in the now-familiar Blue Note hard bop idiom, but with an expanded palette: both sessions employ a euphonium — a brass instrument heard in marching bands rather than jazz — and congas, in addition to the usually trumpet-sax plus rhythm format, and a number of tunes are in 3/4 and even 7/4. Throughout, Hubbard’s ideas as a bandleader, arranger, and composer never flag — in much the same way that his drive and inspiration as a trumpet soloist never does, either.

This is my favorite period of Freddie Hubbard’s music, though he became much more of a crossover star with his pop- and fusion-oriented recordings of the 1970s and 1980s. By the 1990s, he was barely able to play at all due to what Mr. Blumenthal identifies as “embouchure problems”; I saw Hubbard live in clubs many times, yet I never really heard him at all, alas. Sadly, this connects him to the unfortunate pattern of brilliant trumpeters of his approximate generation (Morgan, Little, Brown, as well as the younger Woody Shaw and the older Fats Navarro and Kenny Dorham), none of whom made it out of their 40s. 

One of the collection’s more curious albums is the 1962 “Here to Stay,” a first-rate example of the Hubbard-Shorter front line with another tremendous rhythm section (pianist Cedar Walton, bassist Reggie Workman, drummer Philly Joe Jones). The major uptempo numbers, particularly “Philly Mignon,” are especially thrilling, while “Nostrand and Fulton” holds our attention not only with first-rate soloing, but by subtly transitioning between 4/4 swing and waltz time.  

I describe this album as curious because for some unknown reason, it wasn’t released until 1976 — it sounded as good as ever then, even as it does today. There’s no title song — nothing called “Here to Stay” — but that phrase provides an accurate description for all of the music of Freddie Hubbard.