He reminds us of the swiftness and diversity of the music's evolution of the breadth of its dissemination of the thoroughness with which it

He reminds us of the swiftness and diversity of the music's evolution, of the breadth of its dissemination, of the thoroughness with which it has been absorbed by other cultures.Unlike Louis Armstrong, jazz's first great instrumentalist, Ellington did not rise to world renown from origins in a home for "colored waifs". Unlike Charlie Parker, jazz's other undisputed genius, he avoided the indulgences that ruined the lives and careers of many musicians. Born in Washington DC, the nation's capital, Edward Kennedy Ellington was a child of the middle class, of handsome, personable parents who provided a solid home where music, in the Victorian manner, was a family activity. His father had worked as a butler at the White House before becoming a blueprint maker with the US Navy. His adored mother instilled in him lifelong religious beliefs and sent him to a piano teacher, Marietta Clinkscales, whose lessons were often the casualty of competition from informal baseball games, and whose encouragement had less to do with the boy's eventual choice of career than his own attempts at fooling around on the keyboard, freed from notions of theory.The nickname was the idea of a high-school friend "I was a pretty fancy guy," Ellington remembered And he always stood apart from the crowd.

Something about Ellington, something that had less to do with his musical and organisational talents than with a mysterious blend of ambition and allure, enabled him to rise above those who led first-class big jazz bands in the inter-war years - the likes of Fletcher Henderson, Don Redman, Jimmy Lunceford, even Count Basie, all talented, all respected - to achieve an imperial position within jazz.It helped that he had a manager with a gift for media-manipulation. Irving Mills promoted his artist with the same cold-blooded thoroughness and intuitive reading of the audience's weaknesses that George Evans, Colonel Tom Parker and Tony DeFries were to employ with pop stars such as Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and David Bowie. Mills made the Ellington musicians dress in eye-catching uniforms, with two or three changes per night. He acquired a special Pullman car in which they toured the country, thereby avoiding segregated hotels while conveying the impression of exclusivity and success. He aggrandised Ellington by playing up any hint of a connection with admirers from other fields of music, such Leopold Stokowski and Percy Grainger. In Reminiscing In Tempo, a new oral biography of Ellington, the British author Stuart Nicholson reprints an "advertising manual", written by Mills for distribution to regional concert promoters. This is almost shocking in the candour with which it supplies hints for selling the band via newspapers, radio, record stores and charity shows, including specimen stories to be placed with friendly journalists, and even suggesting headlines: "Harlem's Aristocrat of Jazz!"; "Music No Other Band Can Play!"; "Primitive Rhythms! Weird Melodies! Amazing Syncopations!"From 1927 until well into the Thirties, the band could be heard at the Cotton Club, where Harlemites and socialites gathered to hear early masterpieces such as "East St Louis Toodle-oo", "Creole Love Call", "Rockin' In Rhythm", "Daybreak Express", "In A Sentimental Mood" and "Black And Tan Fantasy" interpreted by a band featuring the brilliantly outlandish trumpet and trombone solos of James "Bubber" Miley and Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton.

Listening to this music now is to be astonished by the range of gesture and the accumulation of detail crammed into each three-minute tune, and to envy those who were around at the time and were able to take them as they came, released in pairs on double-sided 78rpm records every few weeks - a schedule allowing the listener time to appreciate the significance of each piece and to savour every nuance. This privilege, too, is now lost to us; instead we put on a 70-minute CD and attempt to absorb perhaps 20 such tunes in a row.Between 1939 and 1943, the band's line-up inspired Ellington to a creative peak. With Jimmy Blanton, the first truly modern exponent of the double bass, and the poetic tenor saxophone of the young ballad-master Ben Webster in the ranks, and with a fresh charge of compositional inspiration from a new collaborator, Billy Strayhorn, Ellington presided over the performance of a group of pieces which the critical orthodoxy has long claimed to be his finest work. They include "Ko Ko", "Jack The Bear", "Bojangles", `Harlem Air Shaft", "Cotton Tail", "Warm Valley", "I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)", and the extraordinary suite titled Black, Brown And Beige, which premiered at Carnegie Hall. Here Ellington integrates every aspect of his experience and his craft in a music which is interdependent on its composer, its solo voices, and its collective. His years in the semi-vaudeville environment of the Cotton Club had given Ellington an unmatched feeling for colour and drama in music, and for compression and impact.