The godfather of jazz on film was not a performer or a producer but a collector and archivist named David Chertok. Decades before YouTube, DVDs, or even videotapes, Chertok (1922-88) offered 16 mm footage of jazz’s canonical figures in a long-running series of concert-like shows at the New School and, eventually, all over the world. From clips of Louis Armstrong displaying his radiance in 1930s Hollywood features to Charlie Parker receiving an award from Earl Wilson to Thelonious Monk doing his dancing bear act, Chertok gave us an amazing way to absorb jazz. He was showing us what we never thought we’d see, making jazz more “real” to us than any record ever could. (Chertok once bequeathed to me a piece of footage so rare — of the great British jazz and pop singer Al Bowlly — that when Hugh Hefner heard about it, I was summoned to the Playboy Mansion. But that’s another story.)

Chertok couldn’t imagine a world in which jazz video is as accessible as vinyl used to be, where all one has to do is pop a disc into a player or type a name into a search engine. Not that there’s anything wrong with good old studio albums, which offer a kind of perfection you won’t get in a TV appearance, particularly if you want a carefully conceived concept collection. But live performances, snippets and segments of which constitute most of the action on the new eight-disc collection “Jazz Icons: Series 3” (Reelin’ in the Years, jazzicons.com), have a raw energy and spontaneity that no studio session can match. Even when it’s a regular touring group, playing the same set night after night, the players get something back from the audience that they don’t get anywhere else.

Then there’s the proof factor. I have played Rahsaan Roland Kirk for younger listeners and tried to explain to them that the three saxophones they’re hearing are, in fact, one man playing all three instruments simultaneously, without overdubs. But here is the proof, in the form of footage of a 1967 show in Norway: The blind miracle man you see whipping those horns around, resting his flute in his tenor sax when he’s not playing it, is a one-man reed section.

Naturally, there are different kinds of virtuosity that need to be documented by the camera. Oscar Peterson played only one piano at a time, but unless you were fortunate enough to witness him in action at the height of his powers, no one would blame you for believing he had eight arms and was playing four pianos at once.

For a convenient point of comparison, Kirk begins his 1963 Belgium studio set with Milt Jackson’s “Bags Groove” and Peterson commences his Swedish concert of the same year with essentially the same tune, here titled “Reunion Blues” (but also credited to Milt Jackson). It’s hard to say who is more impressive — Peterson with his flying digits or Kirk with his whirling horns and one-man band apparatus.

I never got see Bill Evans perform. On his album covers, he always looked like the essence of nerdy cool, cigarette dangling perilously low, threatening to incinerate either his tie or the Steinway. And just as Peterson appears here beaming at the crowd with his head held high, Evans too is in his characteristic pose, his head hanging limp like a rag doll, too focused on the music to notice the cameras or, for that matter, the crowd. The Icons series includes parts of five Evans shows, concluding with a heavily bearded Evans in color in 1975. But my favorite is a 1965 French concert, in which Evans plays one of his most intimate ballads, “Detour Ahead,” and every note shines as though it were crafted by Harry Winston.

The third pianist in the new package, Nina Simone, was possibly the most extroverted keyboardist-singer in all of jazz or pop — yet also one of the most subtle. In segments of two shows from 1965 and 1968, Simone had already eschewed her earlier standards and show tunes in favor of protest songs. (One can date the first show by noting that Simone still says “negro” rather than “black.”) Her signature tune, “Four Women,” is another of those pieces that needs to be seen rather than merely heard — a major piece of acting in which Simone transforms herself into four distinct characters right before our eyes and makes sure that everybody knows about “Mississippi Goddam.”

Surprises abound throughout the rest of the series: Cannonball Adderley and his Sextet, with their full-dress tuxedos, look curiously formal in 1963 for a group whose specialty was the funky backwoods blues; Lionel Hampton and his 1958 orchestra comes up with something like a concert presentation that encompasses a makeshift history of jazz and climaxes in an orgiastic “Flying Home,” and Sonny Rollins plays two remarkable sets with his 1959 tenor saxophone-bass-drums trio — costarring the young Henry Grimes — including his only documented performance of the beautiful ballad “A Weaver of Dreams.”

Until you’ve seen Rollins, Roland Kirk, Oscar Peterson, and Bill Evans in performance, you haven’t really experienced them, and they’re like nothing you’ve ever seen before. This is the third release in the Jazz Icons series, bringing the total up to 27 volumes, making it possibly the most complete jazz-on-film library available. Here’s hoping that series four will include Sidney Bechet, Gerry Mulligan, Ornette Coleman, Anita O’Day, Lennie Tristano, Ben Webster, Billy Eckstine, and Miles Davis.

wfriedwald@nysun.com