Is there a characteristically British jazz sound, the way there’s a New York sound and a Kansas City sound and a New Orleans sound? New Yorkers will have the opportunity to find out this week, thanks to the first ever festival of British jazz in this city, which will take place at City Center.

The festival, titled Live From London, coincides with the release of several CDs of previously unissued music by the most towering figure in the history of British jazz: Tubby Hayes. The first world-class British jazz soloist, Hayes (1935-73) was one of the few Brits capable of beating the American jazz giants at their own game. Until now, though, many of the multi-instrumentalist’s most celebrated recordings have been notoriously difficult to track down. The new releases offer a fortuitous opportunity to reassess his career.

The English arrived both early and late to the jazz party. They were in the vanguard of jazz in the 1920s and ’30s, when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington spread the message over there. At that early stage, Britain didn’t produce any world-class improvisers – the best of the bunch were saxophonist Freddy Gardner and the Satchmo-esque trumpeter and singer Nat Gonella – but hot dance orchestras led by Jack Hylton and Lew Stone in the early 1930s came close to the level of the best white American groups. Britain’s first jazz-pop export was the arranger and composer Ray Noble, whose most important gift to jazz was the 1938 song “Cherokee,” which became a swing anthem and, later, a bebop standard.

No British bands could compete with Benny Goodman or the Dorsey Brothers at the height of the swing era, but the empire struck back in the postwar years. Pianist Stan Tracey and alto saxophonist Johnny Dankworth, both talented composers, were the best known of the early British boppers. The bandleader Ted Heath played a unique brand of progressive swing and became a British jazz institution; Humphrey Lyttelton, meanwhile, helped spearhead the “Trad” movement.

Nonetheless, jazz was so undervalued in Britain during Hayes’s formative years that he had to teach himself to play the tenor saxophone, which he did well enough to start working professionally at age 15. A year later, he recorded for the first time with the trumpeter Kenny Baker, and by the mid-1950s, he had become part of the orchestra led by Vic Lewis, a disciple of American West Coast jazz.

Hayes came into his own in 1955, when he began recording regularly for the London-based Tempo label. He made more than a dozen albums for the label, the bulk of which, alas, are not available on CD. Many of these were done in collaboration with the tenor saxophonist Ronnie Scott, who later became the proprietor of London’s most famous jazz club.

Not long after Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers established themselves as the flagship band of New York’s hard-bop movement, Hayes and Scott trumpeted their aspirations by naming their new band the Jazz Couriers. Their main musical inspiration, however, was Sonny Rollins, and Hayes showed occasional similarities to the straight-down-the-middle sound of Hank Mobley and the lyricism of Stan Getz. He was also a unique triple threat who was equally competent on flute and vibraphone.

By the late 1950s, Hayes had perfected a full, rich, and distinct timbre on the tenor. He was ready to go where no British jazzman had gone before, cutting a trio of albums on which he challenged top-flight Americans. On 1958’s “Blues in Trinity,” Blue Note teamed Hayes with two formidable trumpeters, Dizzy Reece and Donald Byrd; 1961’s “Tubby the Tenor” costarred the outstanding Clark Terry; and 1962’s “Tubby’s Back in Town” pitted him against the fiercely competitive James Moody and Roland Kirk.

As sharp as he was musically, Hayes was a mess in all other aspects of his life. Overweight, overworked, and addicted to drugs, he died at 38 of complications following a heart operation.

Two new releases add much to our understanding of Hayes. The unfortunately named “Addictive Tendencies” (Rare Recordings) is a two-CD set of previously unknown live recordings of Hayes’s late-1960s quartet. Even better – especially as a primer for newcomers to Hayes’s music – is “Commonwealth Blues” (Art of Life), which offers a concise and compelling glimpse of Hayes’s mid-1960s sound. The CD includes 20 tracks Hayes taped for the BBC in 1965, accompanied by rhythm section of pianist Gordon Beck, bassist Jeff Clyne, and drummer Johnny Butts.

Fittingly, these recordings were initially destined for export: The Beeb distributed the tracks to radio stations in Spanish-speaking countries, complete with an announcer who referred to the band as “El Cuarteto de Tubby Hayes.” For decades, poorly dubbed tapes of the cuts circulated among British collectors; two years ago, a set of the original transcriptions turned up on eBay. They eventually wound up in the hands of Art of Life Records.

The BBC obviously instructed Hayes to keep these tunes short, but the cuarteto was up to the challenge. The CD is split into four sections, each beginning and ending with a short reading of Hayes’s theme song, “Tubby’s Blues.” Hayes successively pulls out the different instruments in his arsenal: tenor saxophone, then vibes, then flute, and, in the last few songs, all three.

Most of the action is on the first segment of the CD, with Hayes on tenor. His three solid readings of great American standards – “The Song Is You,” “The More I See You,” and “Speak Low” – would make for great blindfold tests, even among hard-core jazz aficionados. “Speak Low” uses an understated Latin rhythm, which becomes more pronounced in the bridge, and “The More I See You” is a ballad that employs Getz-like sensitivity without sounding like anyone in the Lester Young school.

On “The Song Is You,” Hayes plays the opening melody like a tiger pacing back and forth within the confines of his cage, and then leaps into the improvisation as if the doors had been magically sprung open. He keeps the track less than four minutes, but he plays everything he can think of in that short time. Somehow there’s even time for a half-chorus solo by Mr. Beck. Hayes returns for the out chorus, confined once again to the Jerome Kern melody, but no longer resenting it. He has undergone a transformation, and, following the inspiration of Oscar Hammerstein’s lyric, in effect become the song. Bloody brilliant, if you ask me.

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The three-night Live From London festival is being produced by Harkit Records, whose catalog of both historical and contemporary jazz (including three packages of live performances by Tubby Hayes) makes it the definitive label for hot music in the United Kingdom. The fun begins April 27 with an 80th birthday celebration for one of the pioneering figures of British jazz, the pianist and composer Stan Tracey. On April 28, the main attraction is the Jazz Brittanica Orchestra led by Michael Garrick and featuring, among other guest stars, the formidable English important pianist Marian McPartland. The series winds up April 29 with four different contemporary stars leading small bands, most notably the multireed player Tim Whitehead.

wfriedwald@nysun.com