When Art Pepper, one of the greatest alto saxophonists of the bebop era, published his 1994 autobiography, “Straight Life,” he finished with a vivid account of what it was like to lock horns with fellow alto giant Sonny Stitt. Once, while Pepper was playing at the Black Hawk in San Francisco, Stitt, then on the road with Jazz at the Philharmonic, asked if he could sit in, which is a little like Mike Tyson asking to trade a few blows.

“That’s the thing with Sonny,” Pepper wrote. “It’s a communion, it’s a battle, it’s an ego trip, and that’s the beautiful part of it.” Pepper described how Stitt took the first solo, playing what seemed like 40 choruses for what seemed like an hour. “He played everything that could be played,” Pepper said. To make matters worse for Pepper, he was in no condition to go up against a gladiator like Stitt; he was wasted on liquor and heroin, and was in the midst of a fight with his girlfriend. Yet somehow he rallied, he “forgot everything,” and played way over his own head. At the end of Pepper’s solo, Stitt just looked at him and said, “All right!”

When you ventured into a cutting contest with Sonny Stitt, you couldn’t expect to beat him — the best you could do was win his approval. For Stitt (1924–82) merely to acknowledge that Pepper had played well made this one of the great moments of Pepper’s entire career.

Stitt’s key role in the early years of the modern jazz movement is illuminated by an excellent new boxed set, the three-CD “Stitt’s Bits: The Bebop Recordings, 1949–1952” (PRCD3-30043–2). Stitt was the first great bop saxophonist after Charlie Parker, but for most of his life he was all too frequently dismissed as a mere copycat.

At the start of his career, Stitt was hired more or less as a replacement for Parker by Billy Eckstine and then Dizzy Gillespie, and then in other situations in which he was expected to fill Bird’s shoes. Stitt claimed he was playing in a mature bebop style even before he had ever heard Parker (which seems highly unlikely), but he also said that Bird, near the end of his life, told him that he was handing him “the keys to the kingdom.”

Yet Stitt also came out of a tradition of jazz players like Art Tatum and Don Byas, for whom the process of competition was all-important, and whose aggressive styles were equally big influences. The idea that Stitt was being written off as an imitator likely infuriated him, making him that much fiercer a combatant. He always played like he had something to prove.

It seemed to be the story of his life. Stitt was given up for adoption in 1924 by his father, Edward Boatner, who was one of the first black concert singers to make recordings and who enjoyed a long career as a director of important choral groups. No one seems to know why Boatner gave his son away, but the child was adopted and raised in Saginaw, Mich. Edward Jr., who grew up to be known as Sonny Stitt, apparently learned music without any help from his illustrious father.

By the early 1940s, Stitt was working with the R&B-tinged swing band of the vocalist Tiny Bradshaw, and in 1946 he recorded on a pivotal session with Gillespie. He was also one of The Bebop Boys, alongside Kenny Dorham and Bud Powell, an early band of secondgeneration boppers who had learned directly from Diz and Bird.

The current box takes up Stitt’s story in October 1949, a few weeks after he finished serving more than a year in prison on a narcotics charge, and also a few months after the young impresario Bob Weinstock founded his label New Jazz (which eventually evolved into Prestige) Records. Previously, Stitt had only played alto, but from this point forward he was featured just as frequently on tenor and occasionally baritone. Weinstock recorded Stitt in two or three different contexts, and featured him playing everything from carefully considered compositions by future giants of the form like John Lewis and J. J. Johnson (who play piano and trombone, respectively, on the first date here) to the most basic blues.

But the most familiar aspect of Stitt’s music is his role as a sparring partner who inevitably made mincemeat out of any jazzman with the poor judgment to throw down the gauntlet. He earned this reputation by sharing a band with another talented tenor player, his fellow graduate of the Eckstine band, Gene Ammons, who is co-featured on nearly a third of the selections here. Ammons and Stitt became notorious on the East Coast (as Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray were on the West) for their inspired exchanges on “Blues Up and Down,” which is heard here in 2 1/2 very different takes.

Yet what Stitt was doing to his fellow musicians, whether slicing them to ribbons or impressing them with his jawdropping skills, was less important than what he was doing to audiences. Stitt’s technique, though formidable, was never an end in itself; what mattered was how he was able to entertain audiences with it. Apart from being endowed with awesome chops and a fierce disposition, Stitt was blessed with the determination and charm to win over a crowd, directly inspired by Louis Armstrong and even Al Jolson.

This comes through most obviously in a marvelous series of quartet sessions, produced by Weinstock, most of which feature Stitt going to town in an unlikely variety of old-time pop tunes. On “Nevertheless,” “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm,” “Jeepers Creepers,” and “Blue and Sentimental” (the latter Count Basie and Herschel Evans’s variation on “Can’t We Talk It Over?”), Stitt’s amazing energy and ebullient personality shine. This 78-era bebop has more in common with earlier forms of jazz as mass entertainment than with the later, more concertdriven forms of modern jazz. Stitt’s technique more closely resembles that of a master magician than that of a concert virtuoso; less like Horowitz or Heifetz and more like Houdini.

Stitt is especially moving on ballads, like the early doo-wop hit “Count Every Star” and the Nat Cole co-authored “Because of Rain.” He also comes up with original variations on “These Foolish Things,” (which he thinly disguises as “Sunset”), “Charmaine,” a classic waltz of the 1920s reconfigured here as a love song in a straight four, and “Back in Your Own Backyard,” a Jolson staple normally done as an up-tempo that Stitt transforms into a melancholy lullaby.

There’s another famous story about Stitt on a JATP tour: Once he was showing off in front of one of his original inspirations, Lester Young, playing his head off, going all over the horn, and playing, again as Art Pepper put it, everything that could be played. Calmly, Young looked at him and said, “That’s nice, but can you sing me a song?”

This box shows that Sonny Stitt could, and often did.