The late Dexter Gordon inspired a strain of jazz literature that insists size matters. The phrase “Long Tall Dexter” appears all over his albums, often abbreviated to “L.T.D.” Gordon was 6 1/2 feet tall, and his size is the first thing you notice about him in his two major movies, “Round Midnight” and “Awakenings” (he was the only major jazzman to receive an Academy Award nomination for his acting).

Size is also the first thing you’ll notice about the new round of Dexter Gordon reissues. These three different box sets collectively contain no less than 17 CDs, and weigh in at well over 25 hours of music.

In his comprehensive notes to the Prestige Box (PRCD-4442-2), historian Ted Panken quotes Maxine Gordon, the saxophonist’s widow; who is herself a scholar and educator, as saying: “He wanted to be remembered as the bebop tenor saxophonist.” This tells us a lot: Between Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, tenors ruled in the swing era, but the altos took over in the aftermath of Charlie Parker.

Most of Gordon’s contemporaries weren’t boppers through and through, but they were significantly divided. On one side were the Hamptonites (Arnett Cobb, Illinois Jacquet) and the Italian tenors, like Flip Phillips and Charlie Ventura, who flew in a Hawkish manner. Wardell Gray and the Hermanites followed Lester Young.

Gordon’s phrasing, generally slightly behind the beat, shows he partook of Lester Young’s laconic coolness. But Gordon was a blues and bop centrist, uniting the Hawk and Pres factions into a single strand. He pointed the way toward the two greatest tenors of the 1950s and 1960s – Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane, and the re-emergence of the tenor as the primary sound of jazz.

Gordon served tenures with Hampton and Louis Armstrong, yet he began to influence other players while he was a member of the Billy Eckstine Orchestra. “Coltrane, Benny Golson and myself were all keyed into his sound,” Mr. Panken quotes Jimmy Heath as saying, “because we were so impressed with the way he adapted the bebop style for the tenor saxophone.” He became a force when he came to 52nd Street from his native Los Angeles and made his first recordings as a leader in 1945.

By the time he began recording a series of two-tenor duels with Gray, his most celebrated sparring partner, Gordon was already a major star in the jazz world. “Bopland: The Legendary Elks Club Concert” (Savoy W4V0Q) captures this period; Gordon wasn’t billed as the bandleader or the star attraction, but his name gets the most response from the audience.

Gordon’s personal troubles kept him out of the picture for nearly all of the 1950s. From the 1960 album “The Resurgence of Dexter Gordon” onward, however, Gordon’s career can be charted in a series of comebacks. Gordon’s Blue Note studio albums of 1961-65 (available on an essential six-CD box, Blue Note 5H1I) are the best.

Both the “Bopland” concert and the Prestige sessions give us Dexter the duelist – first tangling with Gray, then with James Moody, Gene Ammons, Booker Ervin, and alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley in the 1960s and 1970s. I never saw Gordon live in one of his two-tenor jousts, but he strikes me as not the most bloodthirsty of all combatants. He keeps up with his challengers and matches them phrase for phrase, idea for idea. But he conducts himself like a gentleman at all times.

There’s a sense of balance and coherence even to Gordon’s most humorous, quote-laden solos. Gordon was a powerful player, but he never strove to have a big sound. He never sacrificed intelligence for force, and he deserves to be remembered more for his relentless antic wit more than the ferocity of his attack. Who else would detour through “Popeye the Sailor” and “Shine on Harvest Moon” in the middle of “I Got Rhythm,” then offer “Flight of the BumbleBee” as an airborne response to “Lady Bird”?

The last of the three boxes here catches Gordon in the last phase of his career. He was back in the States to stay with (for the first time in his career) his own regular working trio: George Cables on piano, Rufus Reid on bass, Eddie Gladden on drums). You’d think he would have been ecstatic, but after these 1978 and 1979 live sessions at Todd Barkan’s Keystone Korner in San Francisco, he only made a couple more albums.

The Keystone sets (on Mosaic Select, MS-014), like the recording from the Elks Club concert 30 years earlier, captures a very specific time and place. It thus serves as an endearing postscript to the earlier work. There’s still great playing (including irreverent quotes of Louis Prima’s “Robin Hood” in the middle of Jimmy Heath’s “Gingerbread Boy”), but it’s not Gordon’s all-time best.

The booklet, though, contains a great story told by one of Gordon’s most famous employers, Billy Eckstine. It seems that, when he campaigned for John F. Kennedy in 1960, he was asked by the candidate, “How’s old Dex? You know, Dexter Gordon is my favorite tenor player.” Shame on those of us who, all these years, assumed Bill Clinton was the first president who could tell Dexter Gordon from Wardell Gray.