Arnett Cobb created a love letter to Houston. Then it got lost for 55 years.

The saxophonist and composer was born here in 1918 and died in a Houston hospital seven decades later. During the years between, he became the city’s most famous jazz artist from the music’s golden age. Jazz magazine Down Beat once called him “a musical monument,” a status Cobb earned with his inimitable sound on the tenor saxophone.

So a recently unearthed recording session from 1963 rates as a true treasure for those who admire a trailblazing instrumentalist, a distinctive interpreter and a remarkable composer. The album, “Welcome Back: A Love Letter to Houston,” is scheduled for release in August, on what would’ve been Cobb’s 100th birthday. Adding to the local appeal: One of the new songs “Colt .45 Swinging” — which Cobb wrote for Houston’s then nascent baseball team — was made available this week to coincide with Major League Baseball’s opening day.

“Any additional recording by any great jazz musician like Arnett Cobb is important,” said Robert “Doc” Morgan, who played piano in Cobb’s band, the Mobb in the ‘70s and also headed the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts’ storied jazz program for years. “For one thing, jazz artists never played anything the same way twice, so you never know when a piece of music comes along that’s better than anything that artist put out previously. Finding a new Cobb recording is like finding something by Miles Davis.”

The recording sat in the vaults at Houston’s SugarHill Recording Studios for decades until engineer Andy Bradley found it several years ago when he was writing a history of the studio. Bradley had worked with Cobb late in the saxophonist’s life. But when he played the 1963 tapes, he found their contents bracing.

“Working with him was a highlight of my life,” Bradley said. “He played with such great energy, even in his last years. But I could tell this recording was something special right away.”

Though renowned as a pioneer and practitioner of the “Texas tenor” sound, Cobb through much of the 1950s was based out of New York and New Jersey. But by 1963 he was back home in Houston, and the city decided to celebrate the return. Mayor Lewis Cutrer and the city organized a grand welcome with a parade and proclamation ceremony on June 23, with sponsorship by the baseball team the Colt .45s, who were in their second season and would soon become the Astros after moving to the Astrodome.

Cobb capped Arnett Cobb Day with a concert at the Paladium Ballroom. He then decamped to the storied Gold Star Studios (later renamed SugarHill) with saxophonist Don Wilkerson, drummer Duke Barker, pianist Paul Schmitt and bassist Buell Neidlinger.

Wilkerson’s presence on the session should be met with enthusiasm by jazz fans. The troubled and talented Houston-based saxophonist didn’t make many recordings during his erratic career, which ended when he died in 1986. Neidlinger just died a few weeks ago after a distinguished career in both jazz and classical avant garde.

“To hear something by Wilkerson in his prime, to hear him and Cobb together, that alone makes me salivate,” Morgan said.

Bradley described the sessions as “a little more bebop-oriented than usual for Arnett,” perhaps because Cobb was pushed by his younger companions as jazz found itself in a transitional phase. Cobb was 45 at the time. Wilkerson was 31 and Neidlinger 27.

Cobb likely financed the recording sessions with plans to release them quickly.

“All Houston awaits the ‘Welcome Back Album’ made on the nite of the affair in the Paladium which is scheduled to be released soon,” read a Houston Post account of Arnett Cobb Day.

“Soon” — it turned out — lacked specificity.

“I don’t know if it was a lack of coordination or organization or what, or maybe it’s just fate,” said Shae Cobb Williams, Cobb’s grandson, who is mastering the album this week with Lizette Cobb, his mother. “But my mother and I are really excited to have something like this to play for people.”

Even after the tapes were found, the process to releasing them was fraught. Old tapes deteriorate over time. Bradley has a process for “baking” them, which is exactly what it sounds like: exposing the tapes to heat to elimate moisture. The process can restore a tape to its original sound, but it comes with risk of permanent damage.

“Andy asked our permission to bake the tapes,” said Shae Cobb Williams, who lives in Houston. “Mom asked what I thought. I knew we had to take the chance. It was too important to not take the chance.”

Cobb’s career began with violin lessons as a child before he took up the saxophone at Wheatley High School. He gigged around the city while still a student, and upon graduation joined bandleader Milton Larkin’s Orchestra. Larkin was a trumpeter and singer, but he clearly had an affinity for the wild sound of the tenor sax: In addition to Cobb, he hired the great Illinois Jacquet. Cobb’s time with Larkin opened the door to a bigger job in 1942 when Cobb began a five-year run with Lionel Hampton’s band, where he played lead saxophone and also composed and arranged music for the big band great.

In the late 1940s Cobb left Hampton’s employ and started his own band. Cobb during this time helped develop a style with his instrument that would prove influential for generations of players going forward. His was a full-bodied sound that poured naturally from him, whether it was delivered in a whisper or a howl.

“When I listen to his records I hear elements of early rock ‘n roll, the blues, boogie woogie, R&B, what some would call ‘church music,’” said Reggie Quinerly, a jazz drummer who studied at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in a classroom where Cobb’s photo was always displayed. “We look back and say people played this style then, and that style then, but I don’t think people were as hardline about it at the time. Arnett Cobb was just a guy playing, but in doing that he made a contribution with this incredible sound that’s unmistakable.”

Cobb survived a horrifying car accident in 1956, but it sidelined him for a year. He never fully recovered, requiring multiple spinal surgeries and crutches to keep ambulatory.

The hard winters in the northeast were further taxing because of his injuries, so in the early 1960s Cobb returned to Houston. He became a fixture on the city’s stages and also ran the club Ebony. He helped national touring acts secure backing bands and mentored young talent.

When his daughter took over management, Cobb began touring again, finding international audiences ravenous for his music. A concert review in the New York Times from 1978 said Cobb “continues to play with seemingly undiminished fervor and skill.”

Because Cobb cut his teeth in the '40s, he developed an old-school showman’s mastery of the dynamics required to put on a soul-stirring show. He was a flamboyant performer, and much of his reputation derived from the large sound he could extract from his instrument.

But Cobb was also a balladeer capable of delicacy and depth of feeling.

“He was from a generation that knew how to play to an audience,” Quinerly said. “Sometimes that meant he’d come in blaring. Other times, he could destroy you with a ballad or a pretty melody.”

Among the most striking of the newly discovered songs is “My Lizette,” a gorgeous ballad Cobb wrote for his daughter.

Cobb died March 24, 1989, but he didn’t go without some fight. He made a live recording at the Wortham Center in 1987 with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and Houston singer Jewel Brown. And in 1988 he sounded vital on two recordings with saxophonists Jimmy Heath and Joe Henderson, who were 10 and 20 years his junior, respectively.

Those albums appeared to be the last the world would hear from Cobb. But “Welcome Back: A Love Letter to Houston” brings his connection to the city full circle again and with youthful vigor.

“To have found it and played some part in getting it into circulation,” Bradley said, “that’s one of the biggest and most important things I’ve done in a long time.”