THIS four-album collection of music from alto saxophonist “Sonny Red” Kyner (1932-80), whose star shone brightly but all too briefly in the early 1960s, is a marvellous compilation of his prodigious talents, as well as those of many of his luminous contemporaries.

On first album Breezing, Red plays with a mercurial fluidity and agility of sound, with his terse horn breaking from the opening riff of Brother B, with trumpeter Blue Mitchell’s crackling chorus and Yusuf Lateef’s tenor saxophone solo all buoyed up by Barry Harris’s swinging piano and the rhythmic impetus of bassist Bob Cranshaw and drummer Tootie Heath.

On Teef, Lateef brings Detroit to New York, where the albums were cut, alongside Red’s caustic chorus. All I Do Is Dream of You has Red swinging a songbook ballad with melody and the blues fused in every note and his breezy title tune blows a very warm wind indeed.

The New Blues, also written by Red, takes off at a jaunty pace, with its blues-baked notes scurrying and Mitchell chasing through his phrases with a seemingly effortless buoyancy.

The album A Story Tale has a very different personnel and Red’s number Defiance perhaps reflects the civil rights struggles and the freedom rides in Atlanta and Albany of the time.Red certainly blows with a sense of wilfulness, firing up tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan’s power-burning notes.

The two hornmen’s joint composition Hip Pockets is a metropolitan strut, with pianist Tommy Flanagan comping hard as Sonny and Clifford blow with life and zest as drummer Elvin Jones’s snares rattle beside them and the Irving Berlin ballad They Say It’s Wonderful has emotion squeezed from every note.

Red’s is the only horn on third album The Mode, a mixture of his own originals and standards. He explores the familiar undulations of I Like the Likes of You with Cedar Walton’s striding piano themes, picks up the soundscape of Bye Bye Blues with joy gushing from his horn and riffs his way through his own Ko-Kee with felicitous ease.

On the concluding album Images, the nonpareil blues-to-bop guitarist Grant Green’s southern blues has deep affinity with Red’s northern blues timbre, while Sonny’s Blues is a classic coalescence of north-south jazz and blues unity as Motown meets St Louis in Manhattan.

Red never regained the prolific recording activity of 1960-61 and he faded into recording obscurity before dying in 1981. But for a few months at the turn of the 1960s he was a flyer, making his own indelible mark on jazz history.