Leon Berry seems to have been a stocky, slightly pudgy guy who usually sported a mustache and spectacles, as well a goatee that gave him a vaguely Asian appearance and inspired his fellow musicians to nickname him “Chu.”

But for all of his prominence as a star of the big band era, he seems never to have posed for a formal portrait: In nearly all of the shots in the booklet of the new Mosaic Records package, “Classic Chu Berry Columbia and Victor Sessions,” Berry’s face is obscured by his glasses, his horn, or other players. If it’s almost impossible to get a real picture of what he looked like, it’s only slightly easier, at first, to appreciate what he sounded like and to realize why, 65 years after his death in a car crash at 32, we not only still listen to his music but are hungry for any scrap of it we can find.

As with Berry’s photos, in his music we only hear flashes of greatness here and there. Not only did he die very young, but he never led his own working band, and nearly all of his recordings were made as a sideman in somebody else’s orchestra: 16 bars here or a full chorus there, but almost never more than that. In this highly recommended seven-CD boxed set, the boutique jazz reissue label lives up to its name and presents Berry’s career as a mosaic of visual and musical fragments from all over. Mosaic has pieced together casual images of Berry (mostly snapshots by fellow musicians) and recordings by all manner of bands of the 1930s. It all adds up to a compelling portrait of a pioneering saxophone stylist.

The most important facts of Berry’s short life, as detailed in Loren Schoenberg’s comprehensive booklet, are that he was born in 1908 in Wheeling, W. Va., to musicloving parents in the black middle class. He was one of the rare musicians of his era to attend college. Inspired by Coleman Hawkins’s early recordings, he took up the saxophone, first alto then tenor. After playing in various regional groups, he came to New York around 1930, working in several Harlem bands. Berry is best remembered for two extended gigs with two of the most crucial jazz orchestras of the era: pianist-arranger Fletcher Henderson (between 1936 and 1937) and singer Cab Calloway (between 1937 and Berry’s death in 1941).

In the last part of his tenure with Calloway, Berry shared solo space with Dizzy Gillespie, then a young trumpeter who would become, after Berry’s death, one of the founding fathers of modern jazz. In assessing Berry’s legacy, there’s little here that the postwar generation would have regarded as pure jazz or art music: This is, for the most part, dance music and pop vocal music, spiced up with heavy jazz elements, but essentially aimed at mass-market dance hall and jukebox audiences. Berry was especially adept at inserting a lot of individuality into a short space — he can get his point across in eight bars — a quality that endeared him to bandleaders and A&R men of the 78 RPM era. To hear an entire 32-bar chorus from him is pure nirvana.

Berry’s recordings with Henderson and Calloway form the nucleus of the Mosaic box, but he recorded frequently with a wide variety of singing entertainers, including three of the greatest jazz vocalists of all time: Bessie Smith, Mildred Bailey, and Billie Holiday (all of whom are featured here), as well as musicians who doubled as jolly vocalists in the tradition of Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller — trumpeters Red Allen and Wingy Manone, pianist Putney Dandridge, and the most extravagant singer-bandleader of them all, Calloway. The antics of these performers are so entertaining, even today, that we would probably be listening to them if Berry weren’t playing on these sessions.

Yet what a lift he brings to them: It isn’t a case of “rescuing” a so-called “dog tune” of the period and making it listenable, but taking a record that’s already good and elevating it to greatness. “Utt-Da-Zay,” from 1939, is one of several traditional Jewish songs that Calloway sung and swung into the big band era. After Calloway does a yiddishkite hide-ho with the rest of the band as choir, Berry arrives to rev up the tempo, dig in to the chords, and transform the complexion and character of the piece into something darker and deeper, yet at the same time, hotter and swinging.

In the Calloway selections especially (which comprise 73 of the 178 tracks in the package), a unique trinity forms among the leader in front of the band (who was exceptionally gifted in both of his roles, singer and conductor), the songwriters and arrangers behind the scenes (especially Benny Carter, who wrote for both Henderson and Calloway in addition to leading his own groups), and the soloists, especially Berry, who provide the music with swinging sparkle and luster. Berry came up with the riff that became the hit “Christopher Columbus,” later interpolated into the Benny Goodman masterpiece “Sing, Sing, Sing,” one of the signature works of American music.

There’s hardly a chorus in the whole package that Berry doesn’t make special: He sounds great on the first date here, with Carter’s group, not only stopping the show with a chorus on “Krazy Kapers” (1933) but returning for an eightbar encore later in the disc, as if the leader was acknowledging that he couldn’t get enough of Berry’s tenor. He is equally impressive on his last track, “My Coo-Coo Bird (Could Swing),” one of several ornithological novelties rendered by Calloway, recorded about a month before Berry was found dead on an Ohio highway. The words and music are hardly Cole Porter, and Berry is only given a brief eight bars on his own (more than is allotted to Gillespie, who is heard blasting through the ensemble), but Berry has more than enough opportunity to lift the proceedings to a higher level.

Berry is especially winning on two dates that constitute half of the four studio sessions he recorded under his own name. Even here, on two cunningly linguistic pieces, “Now You’re Talking My Language” and “Too Marvelous for Words,” Berry recruits an entertainer-vocalist, the brilliant Hot Lips Page. But make no mistake — Berry is the dominant figure, stepping out after the opening melody and taking charge with a powerful statement, bouncing all over the chords and making sure there’s no doubt whose date this is. (In fact, the only flaw of the package is its failure to include the other two studio dates done under Berry’s name. They were produced by Commodore Records, and it obviously was impossible to get the rights, but it’s unlikely that anyone else is going to do a more complete Chu Berry project anytime in the future.) Even on his own recordings, it’s impossible to anticipate Berry’s entrances; he is just suddenly there, making everything right with the world, as if by magic.

wfriedwald@nysun.com