Tommy Dorsey, the great bandleader and trombonist, was born 100 years ago this month in Shenandoah, Penn., where his father worked as a coal miner, a music teacher, and a bandmaster. The elder Dorsey instilled in his sons, Tommy and Jimmy, a combative nature and a strict, unrelenting sense of discipline that Tommy would later pass along to the musicians in his own band. Dorsey’s relentless drive for perfection and success – they were the same thing to him – fueled his rise from the ranks of freelance musicians in the 1920s to become co-leader of the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra in the early 1930s. When he left to form his own band in 1935 after a typically dramatic fight with his saxophone-playing brother, he founded what would become the most consistently popular band of the swing era.

Unlike fellow giants JackTeagarden, Red Nichols, and Eddie Condon, all born in 1905 (or his brother, whose 100th birthday went by largely unnoticed 18 months ago), Dorsey is getting the attention he deserves this year. Starting tonight, Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola will host a weeklong centennial celebration featuring the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra and guest crooner Nick Hilscher. An outstanding three-CD retrospective of his career, “The Sentimental Gentleman of Swing: Centennial Collection” (Bluebird/Legacy 711672), was released last month, and the first full-length Dorsey biography, Peter Levinson’s “Tommy Dorsey: Livin’ in a Great Big Way” (Da Capo Books, 354 pages, $27.50), comes out this week. Together, these releases illustrate both the diversity of Dorsey’s music and the manner in which his exacting nature as a bandleader paralleled his off-stage personality.

Just as Benny Goodman was the “King of Swing,” Dorsey liked to be announced as the “Sentimental Gentleman of Swing.” That contrast between sentiment and swing provides an accurate description of Dorsey’s temperament and music, and Mr. Levinson provides a compelling glimpse of the trombonist’s Jekyll-and-Hyde personality. He shows how Dorsey could be supportive and warm one moment and turn on anyone – lovers, musical collaborators, his own brother – in the next.

Mr. Levinson is not a musicologist and offers little in the way of analysis of Dorsey’s recordings or solos; he also gets the odd date wrong and is given to strident oversimplifications: “It was Jelly Roll Morton […] and Louis Armstrong who invented what became known as swing,” he writes. But he is a tireless researcher who has uncovered several salient details about Dorsey’s life. We learn that both brothers started on cornet – their father’s instrument – and were especially competitive on that horn. Dorsey played the cornet occasionally in the 1920s,and songs like “It’s Right Here for You” show that, compared to his smooth, sentimental trombone work, his cornet playing was considerably more rough-hewn.

Mr. Levinson also sheds new light on the most visible part of Dorsey’s legacy: his relationship with Frank Sinatra. The trombonist was by turns a teacher, father figure, musical influence, and business role model to the younger singer; from Dorsey, as Wilfred Sheid once put it, Sinatra learned how to hold a note, a drink, and a grudge. Their association, like that of Dorsey with his brother and of both men with drummer Buddy Rich, was yet another in a long parade of love hate relationships. Those, Mr. Levinson shows, were the only kinds of relationship Dorsey knew how to have.

The producer of the box set, Michael Brooks, has also done his homework. Not only has he adeptly assembled the biggest hits from Dorsey’s 30 years in the limelight, but he has dug up some amazing obscurities. The first disc is devoted to Dorsey’s early recordings as a sideman with many of the best-known bandleaders of the jazz age – including Paul Whiteman, Ben Selvin, and Sam Lanin – and the third disc is a collection of live air checks that showcase the Dorsey band at its most exciting. A notable example is the surprising, four minute reading of the riff instrumental “Easy Does It” from 1940, which features tenor saxophonist Don Lodice doing something almost never heard in a big-band hit of that era: He plays to his heart’s content, soloing for chorus after chorus of blues.

Both the set and the book illustrate how Dorsey held his own after the swing era, making new and exciting music with the aid of ace arrangers Bill Finegan and Sy Oliver and outstanding trumpeter-vocalist Charlie Shavers. Tracks like “At the Fat Man’s” show how Dorsey kept his music relevant without capitulating to the forces of bebop, which he made a great show of loathing. Still later, Dorsey rejuvenated his music by rejoining forces with his brother and becoming the first great bandleader to launch a major career in television. It was in the latter capacity that he was able to do almost as much for Elvis Presley as he had done for Sinatra 15 years earlier; the box includes a marvelous big-band blues treatment of “Heartbreak Hotel,” by Presley with the Dorseys, to prove it.

But the highlight of the box – and of Dorsey’s career – is “Song of India.” Most jazz lovers have heard this song so many times they forget how remarkable it is that a Russian impression of an Indian prayer became an American classic. The song began life in 1897 as an aria in Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Sadko,” and Whiteman brought the piece into American pop with a dance band treatment in 1921.The Whiteman version merely essayed the Rimsky-Korsakov melody in dance time; Dorsey’s version, which he debuted at the end of 1936 when his own band was less than 18 months old, was an entirely different animal.

The introduction, written by guitarist-arranger Carmen Mastren, has drummer DaveTough pounding quietly on his tom-toms, punctuated dramatically by forte blasts from the brass section. The melody is then played by the leader in a manner that clearly illustrates why he was widely regarded as the greatest ballad player on his instrument. Dorsey “sings” the melody with little or no decoration, just a rabid vibrato that allows his horn to approximate a human voice in the middle of a Hindu prayer.

One of Dorsey’s tricks was to play a microtone sharp, which made his horn sound even more like a voice, and made all other trombonists sound flat by comparison. On “Song of India,” you not only hear the legato, vocalized tone that so influenced Sinatra, but a mystical quality that anticipates John Coltrane’s religious offerings. All heck busts loose when trumpeter Bunny Berigan goes to town in a characteristically exuberant solo, but that mainly serves as a contrast with Dorsey’s understated reprisal of his opening salvo. Dorsey’s amazingly human-like timbre has never been more brilliantly showcased.

The music of Tommy Dorsey will be featured until November 6 at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola (Broadway at 60th Street, fifth floor, 212-258-9595).