You couldn’t get much further from jazz’s birthplace in New Orleans, Louisiana, than the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, but it was there in the town of Visby in 1928 that one of the music’s greatest exponents of the baritone saxophone was born.

Lars Gullin astonished all those around him as a child accordionist, but when he moved from his home island to Stockholm in 1947 his reputation grew first as a pianist and then as a baritonist after 1949 when he first heard Gerry Mulligan on the Birth of the Cool sessions.

He played baritone horn with altoist Arne Domnerus and trumpeter Rolf Ericson in Stockholm from 1951, also working and recording with visiting US musicians like Clifford Brown, Zoot Sims, James Moody and the very influential saxophonist Lee Konitz.

By 1953 he was leading his own group and by ’54 his Swedish recordings had achieved such popularity in the US among jazz listeners that, despite being based in Stockholm and having never been Stateside, he won the Best Newcomer award from the prestigious Downbeat magazine and had Swedish-made records released across the US on renowned labels like Atlantic and Contemporary.

His subsequent career was much despoiled by narcotics, although his 1954 visit to England included a rapturous response from London audiences at the Royal Festival Hall — “More Gullin! More Gullin!” they shouted after his performance — and the inspiration to write two of his most memorable tunes, Soho Blues and the beautifully soulful Manchester Fog.

He spent time in Copenhagen — he recorded a fine album with Archie Shepp there in 1963 — settled in a forest home in southern Sweden and devoted himself to composing, sometimes for jazz musicians and symphony orchestra, and died in 1976 having just typed: “The heart is the seat of my musical thoughts and the brain is their rhythmic laboratory.”

The four CDs of this compelling Fresh Sounds Records compendium of Gullin tracks brings together his complete studio recordings of the late ’50s, when his artistry was at its apex and he was recording regularly with other outstanding Swedish virtuosi like altoist Rolf Billberg and Domnerus, trombonist Ake Persson and trumpeter Jan Allan.

The selection is peppered by US songbook standards, but by far the most engaging performances are those of Gullin compositions that reach deeply into Swedish folk traditions.

Listen to Gullin’s serenely buoyant and meandering solo on his original Fedja followed by Domnerus’s similar light-touched chorus. You almost forget who is the baritonist and who is the altoist, so twin-like are both reedmen’s featherweight sounds and conceptions.

Or the beautifully and sadly melodic Ma, deeply un-American in its timbre and including a softly tranquil solo by Gullin. Or there is the vibrant Perntz, full of life and unsuppresible optimism, the tune Gullin dedicated to his Stockholm psychiatrist.

On the third and fourth CDs there are more powerful Gullin themes. Allan and Billberg shine on the March and April dates, in particular on The Flight made with a nine-piece band, where Gullin takes off supremely and fizzes aerially alongside his baritone sax confere Rune Falk and Billberg in Scandinavian splendour.

Or there is Icarus on the Moon in a quintet with Allan, who plays with an appealing lyricism in a gently-poised chorus before Gullin enters for a beautifully fluid solo which seems to levitate in the Stockholm air.

Gullin and Billberg came together again in the octet sessions of 1959 for four more Gullin tunes. The aptly titled Fine Together includes some fine work by tenorist Harry Backlund and pianist Lars Bagge, Gullin’s baritone sings amiably through The Black Rose and his Merlin is also affable and warm-noted.

In 1960 the octet reassembled for the February sessions that produced Gullin’s The Yellow Leaves’ Love to the Earth and the poetry wasn’t only in the title.

The horns’ harmonies and Gullin’s finely honed solo beside Bagge’s comping piano are powerfully evocative.

The jaunty Blue Mail has some striking choruses from trumpeter Bengt-Arne Wallin and Billberg, and Baritonome has some more impressive Billberg and Backlund.

The Swedes had their own rich pool of jazz musicianship, that was for sure.

The penultimate Gullin tune is the potently full and busy Stockholm Street with Gullin in confident and unique gait striding down its centre with his ever-talented compatriots, creating their very own sounds in their very own way, to which Lars Gullin undoubtedly gave their own excellence.