The only typical thing about “Moon Mist” is that it embodies the output of a composer who never wrote a “typical” tune in his life. It’s one of the few Duke Ellington pieces that features a violin soloist, in this case Ray Nance, who more often was heard as one of the band’s trumpeters. As the title suggests, “Moon Mist,” explores celestial fringes — there are combinations of sound that transport us through the heavens on fluffy pink clouds. Yet just as much of the tune drags us through the gutter, such as a deep, blue-brass section tutti that sounds like a direct extension of the one that Ellington utilized in “The Blues,” from his extended work “Black, Brown, and Beige.”

For any other composer, “Moon Mist” would be a career highlight (technically, the piece was credited to the Maestro’s son, Mercer Ellington, but it is believed that the Duke had more than a hand in writing it), but for Ellington it’s almost nothing, a minor bauble of a piece that was buried in negligible spots in his concerts. Indeed, “Moon Mist” is representative of a career in which the lesser works were superior to everyone else’s masterpieces. “Moon Mist” is actually heard twice in a new eight-CD boxed set, “The Duke Box” (storyvillerecords.com); the second version, recorded live at Carnegie Hall in 1943, is slightly longer because it adds a piano introduction before the violin states the central melody.

Great art is supposed to be a rare and precious thing, but if you described the music of Duke Ellington in such a fashion, you’d be only half right. Precious? Yes. Great? Yes. But just the opposite of rare: Ellington was not only the most exalted American composer, he was the most prolific: There was hardly a day during his 74 years that he wasn’t involved in some means of making music — composing, performing, or recording it.

For just about any other musician, regardless of era or genre, a 155-track boxed set would presumably represent a comprehensive collection. But Ellington fans know that eight CDs is not even a drop in the Ducal bucket. As the late pianistcomposer John Lewis once told me, “Ellington gave us enough music to work on for the rest of our lifetimes.” By “us,” he meant a universe of discographers, scholars, transcribers, catalogers, and other researchers. (By way of comparison, Storyville Records is also gradually releasing the Ellington band’s “Treasury Series” broadcasts of 1945–46, a project that, when first issued on LP 20 years ago, comprised more than 50 albums, and will fill 24 CDs when complete.)

Indeed, “The Duke Box” is the product not just of the Maestro and his musicians, but of the labor of three of those die-hard Ellington enthusiasts, starting with the gifted engineer Jack Towers. In 1940, Mr. Towers was a high school senior, rabid jazz fan, and aspiring sound engineer when he learned that Ellington’s Orchestra would be playing a one-nighter in his hometown of Fargo, N.D. He took the initiative to arrange (with the band’s booking agency, William Morris) to make a recording of the entire evening. Mr. Towers and a friend, the late Dick Burris, set up a remote disc-cutting machine (this was years before tape recorders were available) and created one of the most remarkable jazz albums ever made: an amazing ballroom performance that captures what the Ellington band actually sounded like in action even better than commercial studio recordings or broadcasts.

Some 40 years later, Mr. Towers began working with fellow engineer Jerry Valburn, who was also the world’s most aggressive collector of Ellington’s music (his former holdings now comprise the Ellington archive at the Library of Congress). The two remastered an extensive series of releases of rare Ellington material and distributed their efforts on a limited basis to hardcore collectors. Eventually the two teamed up with the ambitious Copenhagen-based jazz producer Karl Emil Knudsen, who had worked out an agreement with Mercer Ellington that allowed him to legally release previously unissued Ellington performances.

The 1940 Fargo concert, which takes up two full CDs, is the centerpiece of this extensive collection of live recordings and broadcasts that span the decade and almost the entire nation as well, beginning in January 1940 at the Southland Café in Boston, and winding through the Hurricane Club in New York (1943), the Howard Theater in Washington, D.C. (1946), and several military bases in the deep south during the war years — not to mention Carnegie Hall.

What makes Fargo and the other shows so special is their absolute lack of specialness: At the time, these performances, with the exception of the 1943 Carnegie Hall concert, were not a big deal. Ellington and his men had no idea anybody would be listening years hence; for them, making music on this remarkable level was business as usual. When the gig ended, they packed up and drove to the next town until it was time to make the donuts again. Ellington’s creative mind, and the skills of his remarkable cast of players, were so welloiled that they could create brilliant music without even waiting for a hat to drop.

The Fargo performance still resonates as one of the greatest concert recordings in all of jazz, on a par with Benny Goodman at Carnegie, Coltrane at the Vanguard, or Ellington at Newport in 1956; the way the band tears into such Ellington masterpieces as “Koko” makes even its classic studio recordings seem staid by comparison. Apart from the 1940 Dakota document, my personal favorite session included on “The Duke Box” is the last one, a 1949 performance from the Hollywood Empire Ballroom. What’s remarkable is that this particular edition of the group is one of the leastcelebrated in Ellington’s long history; he is often described as having gone through a fallow period in the late 1940s and early ’50s. But whoever made that pronouncement never heard these recordings, on which the band, somewhat rejuvenated by the return of the great saxist Ben Webster, is positively in the groove.

The group romps and stomps through expanded interpretations of Ellington classics, including an eight-minute “Take the A-Train” that derails into a jam session before getting back on track to the familiar arrangement. Elsewhere are rarities like a Duke-ish deconstruction of the movie standard “Singin’ in the Rain.”

Eight CDs is not nearly enough to do this greatest of jazz orchestras justice. I’m waiting for Storyville to offer all 40 (or so) hours of Treasury Series material into a single massive box, or maybe a mega-download. If they’ve got the money, I’ve got the time.

wfriedwald@nysun.com