“It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” spills from the speakers and dribbles into your soul, at least if you have one. The jazz classic, from 1931, was the first to use “swing” in the title and predated the “swing” era of music by a solid three years. The song was not just ahead of the curve, it defined an age. Though not his most accomplished or sophisticated composition, it is one of Duke Ellington’s standards, a piece that might inspire a lonely Martian boy, who is settling into colony life in 2525, to ask the girl in the next pod over if she cares for a dance.

At the end of what appears to be the definitive biography, Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington (Gotham, 2013) author Terry Teachout provides a list of the “essential” Ellington recordings. There are 50. These standards represent a literal fraction of Ellington’s total output, which numbers in the thousands and constitute an undeniable legacy for all but his fiercest critics, who often argued Ellington lacked the technical ability for long form pieces. Teachout agrees that Ellington never quite overcame his bare training, which prevented him from exploring coherent themes in longer pieces. But this mastery of small spaces is still a mastery. As Teachout notes,

“[Ellington] was, like Chopin, Paul Klee, Jorge Luis Borges, and Flannery O’Connor, a disciplined lyric miniaturist who knew how to express the grandest of emotions on the smallest of scales, and who needed no more room in which to suggest his immortal longings.”

This helps explain why for many Ellington is our greatest composer. To be called our country’s preeminent jazz man would be high praise in the nation that invented the form, but to say he eclipses luminaries like George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein is truly a testament to his supremacy.

Teachout’s Duke is thrilling and inviting, even for the musical dunce that I am. He occasionally strays into technicalities (for example, he discusses the compositional differences between ragtime, swing, and the blues, and he works through, mildly, some of Ellington’s arrangements), but never for long and rarely to the narrative’s detriment. Teachout, as he notes in his afterword, has not written an original work based on significantly new or unknown material. Instead, he has largely taken extant scholarship and synthesized it into a readable form, while also adding insights honed by his own musical training as a jazz bassist. This should not be read to minimize Teachout’s efforts, for the result is peerless.

Some of Teachout’s insights are startling for an amateur, though they may be trite for musicians. I cannot claim enough knowledge to know the difference. Ellington’s career spanned a half century and it varied greatly based on his fellow players. A pianist himself, Ellington became a bandleader early on, and he composed almost continuously, but not in the way most might imagine. Ellington’s best work came not from extended times alone at a keyboard, but during band rehearsals. He might walk in with a snippet or a fragment in his mind and ask a clarinetist to give it a try. Once that began, he might ask a trumpeter to play something that weaves into, or even opposes, that melody. If he liked it, he would exhort them to keep going and ask the drummer to craft a beat, while then imploring the others to fall in line behind one or the other. Meanwhile, copyists would sit on the side, furiously writing the output in order to preserve it. After a few experiments, a piece would be hatched, a “final” copy approved for that evening’s, or the next day’s, performance, and the band would have a new song to perform and, soon, a record to produce.

Instead of being static, however, the piece might evolve over years or even decades, with Ellington constantly tinkering, or perhaps a favored lyricist might add a vocal arrangement. Ellington described his music as always in a state of “becoming.” In so many ways–intellectual, cultural, social, and political–this might be the core notion of the jazz age. I am not suggesting this evolutionary ideal came from Ellington’s pen, but it is indicative of the era he helped define.

This method of composition was highly dependent upon Ellington’s band itself, which was in a perpetual state of flux. Though his genius had many manifestations, for me the most striking was Teachout’s description of the intimate way Ellington composed around the particular qualities of his musicians. He fell in love, for example, with Bubber Miley’s trumpet (and the “wah-wah” sound that he used a plunger to produce), Joe Nanton’s trombone “growl,” and saxophonist Johnny Hodge’s timbre. With these “colors” in mind, Ellington would try to evoke an emotion or a mood with a composition. When a new member arrived, and Ellington heard a “new” sound, his musically sprung bear-trap of a mind would seize on that sound and create from it. He was a maniac in search of the different, and when he heard it, he knew it and it inspired him.

Though few of us are composers, or ever will be, we all work with people. Ellington’s approach should not be called a “leadership style,” for little depresses me more than taking something beautiful and turning it into a template for hacks, but his method deserves consideration. As a leader, he worked with what he had and crafted around those strengths. Like a football coach who adapts his playbook to his personnel, as opposed to the other way around, Ellington composed based on the reality he confronted in the studio. This is not magical, but what he did with that reality, when he creatively twisted it into something hitherto unknown or unheard, can only be called genius.

This method had a clear and predictable downside. Ellington was frequently stingy with crediting his orchestra members as fellow composers. Some of his best known works are co-authored because a soloist approached him with something resembling a full arrangement. However, Ellington did not always acknowledge substantial contributions, which meant that many band members held decades-long grudges against Duke. It is understandable given the financial stakes. Teachout recounts many such episodes–so many that it might taint Ellington’s legacy.

Perhaps the most beloved, yet mistreated, Ellington associate was Billy Strayhorn, who joined not as an instrumentalist, though he played piano flawlessly, but as a compositional jack of all trades. His training was more classical and theoretical, so he rounded out Ellington’s weaknesses in a way that deepened and refined the orchestra’s work. According to Teachout, the two men, for periods of time, functioned like one mind, arranging one another’s work sometimes simultaneously. While Strayhorn got credit for one of Ellington’s most famous pieces, Take the “A” Train, he got no credit for Satin Doll, another orchestra standard. Again, credit mattered creatively but also financially and Ellington frequently benefited from work that was sometimes only partially his. Of all such complaints registered against Ellington, Strayhorn’s was strongest and has been somewhat remedied by musical historians, who see his fingerprints more clearly than audiences ever did. But critical praise long after his death only defines the tragedy more clearly as opposed to obviating it.

Though the issue is thorny, Teachout also defends Ellington in ways. Unlike Strayhorn, who was a talented composer himself, most of Ellington’s musicians did very little apart from Ellington. Some of the disgruntled ones left to start their own bands, but none of those efforts amounted to much. There is little evidence that Ellington’s shadow obscured compositional genius that revealed itself apart from him. In this sense, Ellington, though he did legitimately mistreat some of his band members, was still the driving force behind whatever was brought his way. While he might take a solo or a riff and put flesh on its spare bones, and this often bothered his soloists who were not appropriately credited, this act of transforming the “idea” into a composition was the more creative and durable act.

Finally, since I am a political scientist, Ellington’s attitudes toward matters of race and politics, as depicted by Teachout, also drew my interest. Ellington was a staunch advocate for African-Americans, but rarely as a civil rights activist. Ellington did embrace elements of the movement, but he believed that more could be accomplished if African-Americans constructed a respectable middle class that represented itself well. He was very conscious of how others viewed him and his orchestra. He wanted them to appear successful as symbols of what African-Americans could be. The band’s travels throughout the South brought it close to severe racial oppression and generally stiffened Ellington’s resolve.

He hoped his music, not just his lifestyle, communicated this as well. He wrote several pieces deliberately designed to elaborate the African-American experience. Most famously, Black, Brown, and Beige was a three-part jazz symphony that claimed to describe the phases of this history from slavery through World War II. Ellington wrote the piece specifically for his orchestra’s first performance at Carnegie Hall in 1943.