A Duke With an Ear for His Court : BEYOND CATEGORY: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington, <i> By John Edward Hasse (Simon & Schuster: $25; 466 pp.)</i>

America can boast its true artistic geniuses and its media celebrities, but all too rarely do they coexist in the same individuals. But Edward Kennedy Ellington, whose childhood self-esteem led to his aristocratic nickname, was one of the rare ones. In him, genius and celebrity not only coexisted, they fed on each other.

Ellington, a composer whose innovations extend beyond jazz to the larger setting of 20th-Century music, simultaneously developed into a brilliant artist and a pop-music star in the 1930s and ‘40s. His enormous body of written and recorded works continues to prove him a peerless interpreter of time, place and mood, and nearly 20 years after his death, he remains the towering figure. In John Edward Hasse’s exhaustively researched “Beyond Category,” Ellington also emerges as a complex and charismatic personality who uniquely combined composition and performing, music and business, manipulative psychology and artistic selflessness, personal privacy and international statesmanship.

The facts of Ellington’s life and career have long left aesthetes in both the literature and music camps hungry for a top-notch, full-scale ducal biography. Such a work is in progress, as a matter of fact. In 1991, Mark Tucker published the first book of a three-volume biography, and the clarity and insight of his widely praised “Ellington: The Early Years” (University of Illinois Press) has had Ellington scholars salivating for the sequel. Upon its completion, the Tucker trilogy will likely become the authoritative Ellington biography.

Until then, “Beyond Category” provides quite a serviceable stand-in. The author, musician and historian John Edward Hasse currently serves as curator of American music at the Smithsonian Institution. Hasse has comprehensively surveyed what seems to be everything ever written on or said about Ellington--including the Ellington archives at the Smithsonian--and his considerable accomplishment has been to distill this multitude of sources into one narrative. (A 1987 biography by James Lincoln Collier covered much of the same territory, but earned blanket condemnation from Ellington scholars and jazz historians for its questionable psychologizing.)

Hasse has turned up no major discoveries in his research, but neither has he left any stones unturned, and the book has plenty of unforgettable Ellingtonia. Case in point: In 1963, Ellington overhears an argument outside his dressing room between a man waiting to meet the maestro and the man’s wife, who wants to head home. Ellington solves the crisis by going to the door and, upon his introduction to the woman, sweeps her into the dressing room by saying, “I want to show you something beautiful.” He then stands her in front of the mirror, and as the sly charm of his action dawns on her, her face reddens, her features soften and she becomes the vision Ellington had promised.

Hasse has made an excellent choice in pointing his book toward the general-interest market. He balances the Big Truths, such as Ellington’s ability to tailor his compositions to the individual strengths of his various band members, with the intriguing minutiae of various personalities and fateful encounters. And he has filled “Beyond Category” with photographs and listener’s guides to Ellington’s recordings, as opposed to the more academic musical examples Tucker uses to pin down Ellington’s genius.

But in crunching all this material into roughly 400 pages, Hasse tends to lose control of the narrative flow--and of important concepts that deserve greater focus and command.

Hasse wrestles with his narrative chronology at various points, and he further confuses the reader with the occasional offhanded bombshell. For instance, his statement that “around 1940 (Ellington) even stopped drinking heavily” comes as a bit of a surprise: The reader doesn’t know he had been drinking heavily, since the only previous mention of such a problem occurs 50 pages earlier. Just as odd is this comment by Lena Horne, a close friend of Ellington’s collaborator and alter-ego Billy Strayhorn: “Duke treated Billy like he treated women, with all that old-fashioned chauvinism. Very loving and very protective, but controlling, very destructive.” With no other corroboration, and no follow-up analysis, this potentially fascinating assessment leaps off the page but goes nowhere. The many such examples fall mainly into the “nuisance” category, prompting a good head-scratch or serious annoyance but not impairing the book’s integrity. More serious are the omissions and questionable conjectures that pop up on a regular basis.

For instance, those who read “Beyond Category” will have only a vague idea of how the young Ellington--who at age 7 “showed far more interest in playing outdoors and watching baseball” than practicing the piano--developed from a novice “piano tickler” into a sophisticated keyboard stylist. Similarly, his progression from fledgling tunesmith into major composer receives less than adequate analysis; while Hasse limns Ellington’s performance career and musical innovations with undeniable detail, we miss the “how” and “why” behind the “what” and “when.”

In addition, Hasse’s compression of source material results in some startlingly strange (though often amusing) statements. He tells us that Ellington studied piano “with a teacher who was evidently named Mrs. Marietta Clinkscales.” Huh? The source here is Mark Tucker, who explains in his book that the woman’s name was evidently spelled that way (one of several variants); in his zeal to remain correct but avoid extraneous detail, Hasse has cast doubt on either the woman’s identity or his own scholarship. Later, one of Ellington’s friends dies of “a brain disease” in 1940; presumably that would be the specifically diagnosed brain tumor mentioned 30 pages earlier.

But if Hasse’s tapestry has some loose threads, it also has some long and tidy ones. He follows several basic themes throughout the book--Ellington as problem-solver, his ties to the African-American community, the coincident growth of Ellington’s bands and of Ellington the composer. In his writing, Hasse offers up some lovely, resonant images: “Like the playwright fortunate enough to have a repertory company of actors for which to write, Ellington was able to compose specifically for the various instrumental voices in his band.” Yet he is also capable of statements that continue to confound on repeated readings, as when he explains that Ellington was stimulated “to pursue two formal problems inherent in jazz arranging. Ellington was taking up what Andre Hodeir and Gunther Schuller have called ‘the formal problem of jazz arrangement--how best to integrate solo improvisation.’ This was really two problems.”

“Beyond Category” does not transcend such flaws, unfortunately; but despite them, Hasse’s book merits attention. He has poured hard work, along with an obvious love and respect for his topic, into the task of shaping Ellington’s musical greatness for the general public. That he falls a little short may say more about Ellington’s monumental achievements than about Hasse’s effort.