For more than three decades, Duke Ellington's Carnegie Hall concerts of the Forties (especially the first in the series, which featured his extended work "Black, Brown and Beige") have been viewed as pinnacles of orchestral jazz history. Because of a recording ban, "BB&B" and other pieces from the concerts were not available to the public, which only added to the mythic proportions of the events. Now, Prestige has released the first authorized editions of the legendary evenings, four separate concerts totaling nine discs worth of music we must judge for ourselves. To call this release a major event is an understatement; in the case of "BB&B," it's as if we had just discovered the manuscript of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony when all we had previously known was "da da da DUM."

Comparing Ellington to Beethoven is no exaggeration. He has been acknowledged as jazz' greatest composer since the Hoover administration, and even "serious" critics have begun mentioning him with Charles Ives as a supreme orchestrator. Albert Murray said it best in Stomping the Blues: Ellington's music is "by far the most comprehensive orchestration of the actual sound and beat of life in the United States ever accomplished by a single composer."

Ellington possessed all of the usual qualities of great jazz performers in abundance: he had a knack for creating melodies that stuck in the mind, swung as fiercely or gently as the occasion demanded and, despite his aura of sophistication, were steeped in the blues. What made him so extraordinary were two complementary talents: the ability to hear fresh instrumental combinations beyond the standard groupings of reeds and brass, and the capacity to absorb and exploit the various personalities and personal sonorities of his soloists. Ellington played the orchestra; it was his true instrument, so the cliché goes, which only means that he tapped into the collective creativity that generally is only available to the small jazz group.

Jazz concerts at Carnegie Hall were still rare in 1943, and Ellington marked the occasion with the most ambitious work of his life. The forty-nine-minute "Black, Brown and Beige" was designed to be a "history of the American Negro...and it tells a long story," the composer tells us in his spoken introduction. Several of the piece's main themes did eventually get recorded (a Gershwinesque "Work Song," the beautiful "Come Sunday" and a two-part soliloquy for voice and tenor sax called "The Blues" are best known). What's new here is the piece in toto, with secondary themes and developmental passages intact.

Several critics who attended the 1943 concert chastised Ellington for "going symphonic," and we can now see why. For all of the striking orchestral colors and Ellington's refreshing refusal to become captive to programmatic mood ("West Indian Dance" quickly turns into a train piece), the soloist/orchestral balance of his greatest work is missing. Improvisation assumes a secondary role, and the compressed energy of Ellington's less-majestic pieces is dissipated.

Ellington was aware of these problems, for he reworked "BB&B" twice, in a thirty-one-minute version for the 1944 concert and a nineteen-minute summary for 1946. The piece gains urgency in these remakes and would be a valuable work even at its original length, but it suggests the danger of forcing American art into European formats. Performing at Carnegie Hall, that bastion of respectable artistes, invited Ellington to assume a self-conscious seriousness. Most of his extended works avoid such pretense ("The Perfume Suite" from 1944, 1947's "Liberian Suite"), but occasionally he succumbed—at least that's how I hear most of "A Tonal Group," from the 1946 concert.

These problems of scale are absent from the many classics that fill the majority of these sides. What a world of emotion the man commanded, from the poignancy of "Black and Tan Fantasy" or "On a Turquoise Cloud" and the bustle of "Harlem Air Shaft," to the laid-back "In a Mellotone" and such ecstatic performances as "Dimuendo in Blue" and "Ko-Ko." For proof that Ellington was ahead of his time, consider "Rockin' in Rhythm," a definitive example of swing written five years before Benny Goodman commercially inaugurated the swing era. Throughout these pieces there is an unmatched bond between soloists and writer, and that view of real life Albert Murray alluded to. "Everything had a picture or was descriptive of something," Ellington once told critic Stanley Dance.

"Immortality" is a word that's always overused, particularly so in the past few months. Is Elvis Presley immortal? Bing Crosby? Probably, though we can hardly tell now, which is why I'm reluctant to put the stamp of the ages on Duke Ellington. Yet hearing these Carnegie Hall concerts from his golden years, the urge is overwhelming. Roll over, Beethoven, the A Train approaches. (RS 258)

BOB BLUMENTHAL