The New Orleans clarinetist and saxophonist Sidney Bechet (1897-1959) ranks as a founding father of jazz, second only to Louis Armstrong. Four years older than Armstrong, Bechet was one of the first jazzmen to take the new music outside of New Orleans. He actually recorded before Armstrong (though those pre-1923 sessions are lost), and during the first flowering of hot New Orleans jazz on record, the clarinetist and the trumpeter competed for the title of jazz’s first great improvising soloist.Yet where Armstrong was universally loved, Bechet had more in common with his fellow traveling Creole, Jelly Roll Morton: Both men were domineering, egotistical, and rarely described as lovable.

Bechet’s reputation as Armstrong’s evil twin has prevented him from fully taking his place in the jazz pantheon. But a new box set from Mosaic Records, “Mosaic Select 22: Sidney Bechet” (www.mosaicrecords.com), which features a thorough annotation by the multireed player and one-time Bechet collaborator Bob Wilber, should help illustrate Bechet’s crucial role in the creation and popularization of jazz. The music has been considerably enriched by Doug Pomeroy’s audio restoration, and the early sessions here sound better than I ever thought they could.

Bechet made it to Europe in 1919 – long before Armstrong did – and what happened to him in those early years abroad couldn’t have happened to anyone else. He made a musical breakthrough after discovering the soprano saxophone in London and taming it for jazz. He also did American music a great service by becoming the first jazzman to attract the attention of the “serious” music world. (A respected classical conductor called him “an artist of genius.”) In the same trip, he shamed himself and jazz in general by acting like a drunken hooligan, getting into rows with prostitutes,and being repeatedly jailed and deported from several countries.

Bechet lived in New York upon his return from Europe. He worked here with the young Duke Ellington, who called him “the most unique man ever to be in this music.” He also resumed his relationship with a boyhood friend from New Orleans, the composer and pianist Clarence Williams, who recorded thousands of the most important jazz, blues, and pop sessions of the pre-swing era.It is thanks to Williams that we have recorded evidence of Bechet’s astonishing prowess at this early stage.

The new Mosaic box begins with 25 cuts from the Bechet-Williams sessions, many with singers in the blues idiom (the best of whom was Williams’s wife, Eva Taylor) as well as instrumentals. Bechet is an important presence on such future standards as “‘Tain’t Nobody’s Bus’ness if I Do” and “Mandy, Make Up Your Mind.” On “Oh Daddy,” a superior blues-tinged song of the era, Bechet’s solo utilizes quarter note triplets, making it one of the earliest recorded examples of the rhythmic style later known as swing.

Williams was also prescient enough to recognize the talent of the young Armstrong, who had come to New York to play with Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra. The Bechet-Armstrong collaboration under Williams’s aegis (released as Clarence Williams and His Blue Five) included a remarkable boxing match of a session from January 1925. “Cake Walkin’ Babies (From Home)” is the payoff.

Armstrong takes the melody in the first chorus, but after Taylor’s exuberant vocal, there’s an ensemble chorus in which Bechet plays several breaks that seem to stop time. This only urges Louis on to even greater heights: He shows so many different ways to swing the melody that this solo could have been played by Roy Eldridge or Bobby Hackett 20 years later. After 80 years, musicians and scholars continue to argue over who won the bout, but both men advanced the art of the improvised solo immeasurably. “Cake Walkin’ Babies” was jazz’s first clash of the titans.

Unfortunately for his long-term reputation, Bechet, unlike Armstrong, did not stick around to build on the accomplishments of his early recordings. He was a perpetual wanderer, as Ellington described him, “always looking over the next hill.” While Armstrong was recording his immortal “Hot Five” sessions in the late 1920s and establishing himself as the dominant jazz soloist, Bechet returned to Europe. He traveled as far afield as the Soviet Union, and did not record again until 1931.

It was the popular songwriter and bandleader Noble Sissle, with whom Bechet began working in France, who was responsible for most of the clarinetist’s recordings of the 1930s. The Mosaic box picks up the story with Sissle and Bechet’s Sony-owned sessions of 1937, beginning with a lively big-band date.

Here Sissle re-creates his early hits, notably “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” in the modern swing-band language, heavily featuring Bechet. “Dear Old Southland” is Bechet’s first of several recordings of the song, which the black songwriters Henry Creamer and Turner Layton cobbled together from the spiritual “Deep River” and a minor blues strain resembling W.C. Handy’s trip to St. Louis. Although the singer Billy Banks takes a brief chorus, the show is otherwise Bechet’s, and he seems determined to outplay what Armstrong had done in his classic duet version of “Southland” from 1930.

There’s also a remarkable, lesser-known date from the same batch of 1937 sessions in which Bechet shows how cordial he could be.The only other horn on the date is the excellent Ernie Caceres, one of the first notable baritone saxophonists. But instead of frying the younger man’s bacon, as you’d expect, Bechet is warm and avuncular toward Caceres, whose lovely bass lines on “Jungle Drums” make this one of Bechet’s most delightful outings.

The Mosaic set concludes with the 1947 Columbia sessions, one of which features Bechet backed by Bob Wilber’s Wildcats – few of whom were even born when Bechet recorded “Cake Walkin’ Babies.” These four sessions, all produced by George Avakian, feature Bechet just as he turned 50 .The Wilber date is more in the old-time New Orleans polyphonic tradition, but the quartet sessions, done with older musicians, have more of a modern feel – including the contemporary hit “Laura” and several songs by Cole Porter. Shortly after these dates, Bechet returned to Europe for good, where he made Paris his home base and comfortably lived out the remaining decade of his life.

For me, the best of the 1947 tracks is Bechet’s bravura treatment of “The Song of Songs,” a French piece he had played as a young man with the Southern Syncopators Orchestra during his first European tour.The song – which has nothing to do with the Old Testament – was also recorded that year, almost as beautifully, by the singer Perry Como.

Accompanied by pianist Lloyd Phillips, Bechet takes it slowly, with slight embellishments but nothing that could be called improvisation or even jazz-time. Bechet sings it from the heart, like a concert baritone, more like Paul Robeson or Lawrence Tibbett than Louis Armstrong. The lyrics, which illustrate how music and nostalgia are intertwined, clearly mean a great deal to him: “Song of songs, Song of memory / And broken melody of love and life.” This rendition is overwhelming, rich in sentiment but transcending it at the same time. It’s like nothing you’ve ever heard in jazz.

wfriedwald@nysun.com

On March 20, the Sidney Bechet Society hosts a tribute to Bechet at the Lighthouse (111 E. 59th Street, 516-627-6334) by Vince Giordano and his Minihawks, featuring Mark Lopeman on clarinet and soprano sax.