Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington. By Terry Teachout. Gotham; 482 pages; $30. Robson Press; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

DUKE ELLINGTON once jotted down his personal prescription for a happy life: “No problem. I’m easy to please. I just want to have everybody in the palm of my hand.” That serene egotism lay at the heart of an extraordinary career that made him a living jazz legend, renowned composer and celebrated bandleader. The inimitable style of his music—known as the “Ellington effect”—left musicians amazed and audiences enchanted.

But as a new biography by Terry Teach-out shows, Ellington’s determination to keep his creativity at the centre of his life unleashed emotional turbulence all around him. A man of gargantuan appetites for food and women as well as music, he believed that doing exactly what he wanted when he wanted was the key to maintaining the vital spark that made him special, ordained for spectacular success.

That certainty had been part of his birthright. Born in 1899 to a secure black middle-class family in Washington, DC, he was assured by his doting mother that he was “blessed”. Ellington was an avid supporter of racial progress, of African-American respect and respectability. For him the essence of black experience was Washington’s vibrant music scene, where ragtime ruled and pianists charmed gorgeous ladies. The young Duke found it all irresistible. Ever ambitious, he was soon leading his own band. By 1924 they were playing in New York, and in 1927 they began their long residence at Harlem’s fabled Cotton Club, which made Ellington famous.

His success was a product of his personal charisma (a rival bandleader described him as “more than suave”) and uncanny talent. Ellington transformed big-band jazz by fusing improvisational spontaneity with structural compositions. He turned individual voices into musical material, ensuring an Ellington piece had an organic unity, alive in the moment.

A trained musician as well as an acclaimed biographer of Louis Armstrong, another jazz giant, Mr Teachout adroitly chronicles how Ellington coaxed from his ensemble such timeless hits as “Mood Indigo”. And he adeptly evokes the personalities of the ducal band, a “rowdy crew of iron-willed individualists” who were almost as wilful as their leader. Though men like Johnny Hodges, an alto saxophonist, owed their fame to Ellington, they were also aware of his debt to them. Many resented the way their improvisations became subsumed into the Ellingtonian canon, largely unacknowledged.

But as Mr Teachout makes clear, the band’s achievements proceeded from Ellington alone, and were as inseparable from him as his glittering personality. For half a century he kept his splendid show on the road, writing music not for posterity, but because he wanted to hear it now. The result was an unequalled body of work, from his string of 1940s classics, including his annual Carnegie Hall concerts, to the landmark performance that ignited the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival and relaunched his career, to his globetrotting during the 1960s and 1970s, which ceased only with his death from cancer in 1974. Through it all the man himself remained an enigma, keeping lovers and musicians alike at arm’s length, but in the palm of his hand. And always, as Mr Teachout writes, he was “a genius, a titan of modern music who to the end of his life could conjure high art out of thin air.”