The Duke Ellington Centennial Edition (1999)

The mayor made a proclamation that every adult male had to grow a beard when my hometown, Phillipsburg, N.J., celebrated its centennial in 1960. My dad sprouted some alarming muttonchops and explained the event to me as a time to remember how different things had been in the olden days. That seemed to cover the topic for me when I was in kindergarten, and it has largely sufficed in recent years, as I've tried to understand all the fuss made over countless cultural anniversaries.

The centennials of three major American composers fall in a three-year cluster: George Gershwin, born on September 26, 1898; Edward Kennedy (Duke) Ellington, born 100 years ago this week on April 29, 1899; and Aaron Copland, born November 14, 1900. They make an intriguing trio, profoundly gifted artists who strove to cross barriers of ethnicity and class, challenging long-standing conceptions of high and low art, to make distinctly American music. They took off from divergent starting points — Gershwin from Tin Pan Alley, Ellington from jazz, and Copland from classical music — but all prevailed to be regarded as key voices of the 20th century.

Still, the music of Gershwin and Copland reminds me of my father far more than the sound of Ellington. I hear Rhapsody in Blue and Rodeo, and I see those muttonchops. As much as I respect and enjoy the pieces, they serve as reminders of how different things were in the olden days.

Ellington is, as he always was, above all, an exception. One of the few composers in jazz to be acclaimed by high-brow critics as early as 1932, Ellington was so advanced that most of his work sounds timeless 25 years after his death. His forum was a jazz big band, yet his idiom wasn't really big-band jazz. Performing on the same bandstands for the same audiences as Count Basie or Benny Goodman, making records the same length for the same jukeboxes, Ellington transcended his evident milieu through fearlessly adventurous experiments in structure, harmony, and thematic content (including seminal statements on the African-American experience such as ''Black, Brown, and Beige''). He worked extensively without his orchestra, too, composing two Broadway musicals, four movie scores, a ballet, an opera, and orchestral suites.

In honor of (and to capitalize on) the Ellington centennial, RCA has packaged a reissue box nearly as ambitious as Ellington himself. The Duke Ellington Centennial Edition: The Complete RCA Victor Recordings 1927-1973, like the Ellington-Billy Strayhorn song ''Big Fat Alice's Blues,'' glories in the virtues of heft. It is a big, fat 24-CD set with more than 460 tracks, priced at a commensurably big, fat $407.52. Personally, I'd have expected a set of such monumental scale to go for $407.53, so I see a savings right there.

The Centennial Edition is, however, a seriously impressive compilation worth the investment, and not only for Ellington fanatics (who probably have most of this material from earlier releases, anyway). It certainly has historical breadth, including as it does Ellington's earliest existing recordings (beginning with the charming and vigorous ''If You Can't Hold the Man You Love'' from 1927) as well as one of his last (the rich, dark ''Mecuria, the Lion'' from 1973). It has, moreover, every track Ellington recorded for Victor during the early-'40s period critically lauded as his orchestra's heyday — plus the music Ellington said he considered his most important work, the three concerts of sacred music he composed in his final years. There's something worthwhile here from every decade of Ellington's career, including some alternate takes (but not enough of them to make anyone but a discographer scream).

The accompanying booklet, not incidentally, is an imaginatively and conscientiously compiled anthology of essays and sidebars that stands apart from the CDs as one of the smartest books yet published on Ellington's career. In the end, the music on these 24 CDs argues cogently for Ellington as composer of the century — though not this century. Working collaboratively with musicians of every stripe (from cocomposers Strayhorn and Juan Tizol to arranger Mary Lou Williams to instrumentalist Johnny Hodges), Ellington used his orchestra as a cooperative musical community, and he explored the sounds of cultures in the Near East, Africa, and elsewhere around the world. Yes, Gershwin and Copland reflect the 20th century splendidly. Ellington points to the 21st. A

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