A few weeks after Buddy Rich died in April 1987, I was speaking to another great drummer, Art Blakey (who would himself be gone only three years later), on an unrelated matter. I don’t remember why I originally called Art, but he had Rich on his mind. Unfortunately, I wasn’t taping the conversation or even taking notes (Art spoke so quickly that it would have been impossible), but I remember one thing he said repeatedly: “People think that Buddy was mean. Let me tell you something: Buddy wasn’t mean, he just didn’t take no s–!”

Unfortunately, in the nearly 20 years since Rich’s death, his stature as a great musician – virtually unchallenged as jazz’s greatest virtuoso drummer – has diminished, while his reputation as one of the meanest cats around has increased. (Much in the same way you hear more about Benny Goodman’s legendary impecuniousness than about his musical brilliance – or that Billie Holiday lived to suffer and Frank Sinatra liked to punch people.) Rich’s music was, to a degree, animated by his personality and his presence, even when you were experiencing him on a record rather than in person. Listening to Rich when he was alive was about waiting for the next time his big band would play New York and monitoring “The Tonight Show” for his next bout with Johnny Carson – in those days, Rich was the only one who dared give any lip or attitude, or did anything other than genuflect, to the King of the Night.

Since then, evidence of Rich’s musicianship – his best albums – has been hard to find, yet documentation of his meanness abounds: Two clicks on the Internet will bring you to a transcript or sound file of his infamous band bus tirade, in which he cursed out his younger sidemen for sporting beards (“This isn’t the House of David baseball team!”) and, more seriously, for not playing his music the way he thought it should be played. One Web site (http://www.humblepie.com/buddy.html) has even adapted the band bus tantrum into a play; I always expected to hear Sir John Gielgud perform it as a Shakespeareian-style dramatic recitation.

If more people have heard Rich’s temper tantrums than heard his drums, the antidote is a wonderful, comprehensive reissue. It’s called “Argo, Emarcy & Verve Small Group Buddy Rich Sessions” (Mosaic MD7-232), and fortunately the title is the only awkward thing about it. Here we have, collected on seven CDs, the bulk of Rich’s best albums as a bandleader. The one good thing about the rise of mergers and mega-corporations in the music industry is that these three catalogs are now all under the umbrella of Universal Music. Yet this set actually could have been two boxes, each covering a distinct period in Rich’s career.

The pianist Paul Smith, quoted in John Mc-Donough’s valuable booklet essay, refers to Rich as “the Art Tatum of the drums.” It’s an apt comparison. Virtuosity is a funny thing: A great sense of rhythm doesn’t necessarily make a great drummer any more than perfect pitch makes a great pianist or horn-player (or being able to hit hard makes a champion boxer). Rich’s accomplishment was not only his command of time, which was astonishing (he could make time sit up and beg), but his taste and musicianship.

You will sometimes see very rhythmic pianists, like Thelonious Monk or Cecil Taylor, described in percussive terms – it’s been said they play the piano like 88 tunable little drums. Rich played the drums like a piano, supplying not just time, but the coloration, timbre, and texture – the glue – of the ensemble. There are all kinds of drum solos spread across the 88 tracks, but they are almost beside the point: What really mattered was the way Rich herded the rest of the group.

The first four discs include all the sessions produced by Norman Granz with Rich as chief attraction between 1953 and 1957. These are mostly all-star studio dates, in the same spirit as the Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts, for which Rich was the star drummer for as many shows as Granz could get him. As a rhythm section player, Rich had a unique gift for literally forcing musicians to play above their own heads – he could make unseasoned youngsters sound like a real band, as he so often did later in life. But when you start with players on the level of the swing alto great Benny Carter, the trumpeter Sweets Edison, and the Charlie Parkerstyle Sonny Criss (the latter two are featured with Rich on “Sonny and Sweets,” a paraphrase of the more famous “Blues in the Closet”), you know the results are going to be special indeed.

After a break of three years, the final three discs here document Rich’s remarkable working band of 1960-61, best known for the outstanding albums “Playtime” and “Blues Caravan” (both included here). This was an unusual group, different from anything else he (or anyone else) ever fronted, equal parts swing and bop with a front line of flute (occasionally sax) and vibes, and a swing-style four-piece rhythm section with guitar. (The only session the set is lacking is “Buddy Rich Just Sings,” by far the best of his vocal albums, recorded with Edison and Ben Webster for Verve in 1957 – it should be here.)

Although the 1960 band has elements of the George Shearing and Benny Goodman small groups, the key influence throughout all seven discs here is Count Basie, whose trademarks – his repertoire, his musicians, his famous tags and signature sounds – abound. The 1955 “Wailing Buddy Rich” album is essentially a Basie small group with Rich and the outstanding tenorist Ben Webster (who worked with Basie in Kansas City) added to the mix. In 1956, Rich and the arranger Marty Paich masterminded an elaborate, cool jazz-style tribute to the Count called “This One’s For Basie.” And on the 1957 “Buddy Rich in Miami,” which is not even advertised as a Count-ish collection, three of the five tunes are Basie stand bys. The 1960-61 band is even more Basiesque, capturing the whimsical energy of the Count’s small groups of the atomic era with the flutist Sam Most standing in for Frank Wess.

My favorite moment in the set is in the only live session, the 1957 “Buddy Rich in Miami” that co-stars the eloquent tenor saxophone champ Flip Phillips (and was previously included in Mosaic’s Flip Phillips-Charlie Ventura collection). Both Rich and Phillips were longtime veterans of Jazz at the Philharmonic, and knew when to be supportive and when to be combative. The ten-minute “Jumpin’ at the Woodside” is one of the latter times, when Phillips and Rich are doing everything they can to land a knockout punch, while the pianist and bass (Ronnie Ball and Peter Ind, two Englishmen associated with the Lennie Tristano school) do everything they can to merely try to keep them from murdering each other. I haven’t seen any thing in the Super Bowl or the Olympics (this year or any other) that’s nearly this jumping.

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There’s another new Buddy Rich release worthy of attention, “The Lost Tapes,” a DVD shot two years before Rich’s death. It features the Buddy Rich big band as I remember it, hard driving and swinging and thoroughly extroverted, especially on Rich’s signature medley of music by Leonard Bernstein from “West Side Story.” Unfortunately, it also underscores what was lacking in Rich’s work from the final 20 years of his life: Working almost exclusively with his mostly college-age big band, he rarely had the chance to reach the heights he scaled when he went up against his own peers. There certainly was little in the 1970s or 1980s comparable to the excitement he generated with a simple quartet and Flip Phillips in Miami in 1957, when the two of them kicked more butt than a cross-eyed Rockette. I have no idea exactly where Buddy Rich may be right now, but one thing is certain: Wherever he is, he’s not taking any s–.