The Jazz Crusaders, whose classic work has just been collected in a new box set from Mosaic Records, were major players in the debates that dominated the jazz community in the 1960s. At a time when West Coast and East Coast jazz were perceived as entirely different beasts, the Jazz Crusaders combined the best of both coasts. But when jazz purists clashed with the purveyors of fusion, the band opted to take the low road.

The band came to prominence in Los Angeles in the early ’60s, when West Coast jazz was thought to be softer, cooler, and more classically inclined than the in-your-face New York school of hard bop. The Jazz Crusaders, however, played hard bop with a West Coast whimsicality. Their major influence was Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, but rather than simply cloning the Messengers’ trumpet-saxophone front lines, the Jazz Crusaders utilized a unique blend of tenor sax and trombone in close harmony. Theirs was a user-friendly sound with concise, to-the-point solos and catchy, danceable melodies.

Which keys in to the other debate: The Jazz Crusaders’ music was so accessible that the more snobbish elements of the jazz critical fraternity refused to take them seriously. Never mind that for a time these four extremely talented musicians were so infatuated with jazz that they viewed their work as a genuine crusade. By the early 1970s, the group had dropped the “jazz” both from its name and its music. As the Crusaders, the band was in the vanguard of the music variously known as fusion, smooth jazz, lite jazz, soul jazz, or, in Wynton Marsalis’s term, instrumental pop. That the Crusaders stopped playing jazz led some to conclude that their commitment to the music wasn’t that great to begin with, thus weakening the cause of their crusade.

“The Jazz Crusaders: The Pacific Jazz Quintet Studio Sessions” (www.mosaicrecords.com), the first retrospective collection of this now-overlooked ensemble, is a reminder of how exceptional the Jazz Crusaders really were. This six-disc package, which contains 10 essential jazz albums, along with several singles and miscellaneous tracks, also includes a comprehensive booklet written by Bob Blumenthal that tells the story of how the group came to prominence.

Tenor saxophonist Wilton Felder, trombonist Wayne Henderson, pianist Joe Sample, and drummer Nesbert “Stix” Hooper were all born between 1938 and 1940 and began playing together as teenagers in Houston. Their original band, titled Nesbert Hooper and the Swingsters, was an R&B-oriented dance outfit.

“All the musicians I loved were territory musicians, deeply into blues and gospel as well as jazz,” Mr. Sample says in the booklet. “We couldn’t help but be influenced by the soulfulness of Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters.”

The teenagers underwent a conversion when the “Jazz at the Philharmonic” show came through Texas. “We couldn’t believe what we heard,” Mr. Hooper says. “From then on, jazz became the focal point. We’d go upstairs in Wilton’s house and listen to Dizzy [Gillespie]’s records for hours. I’d be trying to play all of Max Roach’s things. That’s when we got into serious musicianship.”

The four went through Texas Southern University together, forming a student ensemble called the Modern Jazz Septet. “By 1958,” Mr. Felder says, “wesaw that the ability to do what we wanted to do could not be realized in Texas.” They relocated as a unit to Los Angeles, where they sustained themselves as an R&B band called the Night Hawks before coming to the attention of Richard Bock at Pacific Jazz.

From 1961 to 1970, the renamed Jazz Crusaders (a moniker suggested by Mr. Hooper’s wife) recorded prolifically for Pacific Jazz. Beyond the albums included in the box set, they cut enough live albums to fill a second box, as well as a series of “quintet-plus” projects involving a big band, a Latin rhythm section, and various guest stars.

Their two most famous pieces, “Freedom Sound” and “The Young Rabbits,” were introduced on their first two albums. Both are expertly propelled by Mr. Hooper; even though he wasn’t a commanding personality on the level of Blakey or Mr. Roach, much of the group’s work is highly drum-centric. One of the group’s longer pieces, Mr. Sample’s “Freedom Sound,” has a baroque, circular melody that sounds like a gentle march. Mr. Henderson’s “Rabbits” is a blues-driven tune that starts out kicking and screaming and never lets up. While most of the band’s pieces are five minutes or less – comparatively short in the modern jazz LP era – you never feel the soloists are shortchanged.

The Jazz Crusaders also had a penchant for covers. The box set includes treatments of contemporary pop and blues items from B.B. King, the Beatles, the Drifters, Burt Bacharach, and Henry Mancini, along with unique interpretations of material from farther afield. The group apparently grew up on Tommy Dorsey’s hit version of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Song of India,” and their treatment puts the tune into a funky 7/4 meter that is delightfully dance-worthy. They also play a soulful treatment of Ernest Gold’s Yiddishkite movie theme “Exodus.”

On the last of their Pacific albums, 1970’s “Give Peace a Chance,” the Jazz Crusaders were moving beyond their bop and blues foundation. “Space Settlement” is borderline free jazz, and the album features more pop tunes than usual (starting with the Lennon-McCartney title song).

Messrs. Hooper, Sample, and Felder stayed together as the Crusaders for another 25 years, and in the mid-’90s, Mr. Henderson revived the original Jazz Crusaders name for gigs and records, sometimes involving Mr. Felder. Whatever the name, there’s nothing in their electronically driven music of recent decades that matches the euphoria of those jazz years, when they were still young rabbits.

wfriedwald@nysun.com