Billy Strayhorn can occasionally be glimpsed in photographs of Duke Ellington, a smooth-faced, somewhat owlish presence obscured by Duke's regal profile or standing slightly out of focus behind the raised lid of the maestro's piano. Similarly eclipsed by Ellington in his professional life, Strayhorn remained an enigmatic figure until his death, at 51, of esophageal cancer in 1967. Just a few pieces of information about him were generally known. While still in his teens, Strayhorn wrote the music and lyrics for "Lush Life," one of the quintessential saloon songs. During his 27-year association with Ellington, which began in 1939, he composed "Take The A Train", the Ellington orchestra's theme song, and collaborated with Duke on "Satin Doll" and other jazz standards, as well as in the writing and orchestration of Such Sweet Thunder, The Far East Suite and other concert pieces. Only jazz aficionados were likely to be familiar with his participation, as pianist and arranger, in small group recordings led by Ellington alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges, or aware of his sole, largely overlooked 1961 solo album, The Peaceful Side of Billy Strayhorn.

Strayhorn's personal history and his creative efforts apart from Ellington remained unchronicled until the publication of David Hajdu's splendid Lush Life in 1996. The product of eleven years of research, Hajdu's eloquent, sympathetic biography liberated Strayhorn from Duke's shadow and revealed him as an artist of far-ranging gifts as well as an erudite, much-admired, and uncommonly gallant man.

Born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1915, the sickly fourth child of a cultured, long-suffering mother and an embittered, abusive father, Strayhorn was raised in a ramshackle four-room dwelling in Pittsburgh's racially mixed, working-class Homewood district. Young Strayhorn's musical talent first became apparent during summer vacations spent at his maternal grandparents' home in Hillsborough, North Carolina, where he picked out songs on the parlor piano. While in grade school, he worked as a delivery boy for a Pittsburgh pharmacy in order to purchase a broken down upright piano and pay for music lessons and sheet music. Escaping from his hardscrabble environment, the bookish teenager haunted the local library, subscribed to the New Yorker, and learned to speak French.

At Westinghouse High, Strayhorn joined the school concert orchestra and, in his senior year, was featured soloist in a performance of the Grieg piano concerto. At the commencement ceremony of his 1934 graduating class, he introduced and performed his first extended composition, "Concerto for Piano and Percussion." After graduation, he prepared arrangements for and played piano with local bands, and wrote the book and score for Fantastic Rhythm, a musical revue that toured black theaters in Southwestern Pennsylvania for nearly two years.

Introduced to Ellington in 1938 when his orchestra was appearing at a Pittsburgh theater, the 23-year-old Strayhorn impressed Duke and his sidemen with his pianistic and arranging skills. Ellington invited him to come to New York, an offer that Strayhorn eagerly accepted. For the rest of his life, Strayhorn served as Ellington's musical alter ego, in an association so empathetic that their individual contributions may never be fully sorted out.

Although widely, and mistakenly, regarded as Ellington's amanuensis, Strayhorn assembled an impressive body of his own works, including orchestral pieces, theater scores and popular songs, many of which have yet to be published or performed. An openly gay man in an era when such candor required immense courage, he was devoted to beauty in all forms-literature, painting, and especially nature, from which he drew the titles of many of his compositions, among them "Lotus Blossom", "Passion Flower", "Violet Blue", and "The Single Petal of a Rose."

Revered by his musical associates and friends- Lena Horne has called him "the only man I really loved"- Strayhorn, towards the end of his life, became deeply involved in the emerging civil rights movement. An artistic and personal inspiration to those around him, Strayhorn nevertheless had a troubled side, manifested in the melancholic lyrics of his love songs and in the alcohol abuse that contributed to his early demise. At Strayhorn's funeral service, Ellington eulogized his partner and friend as "the biggest human being who ever lived, a man with the greatest courage, the most majestic artistic stature, a highly skilled musician whose impeccable taste commanded the respect of all musicians and the admiration of all listeners."

Darius de Haas explores a broad spectrum of Strayhorn's work. An artist who, to borrow one of Ellington's favorite phrases, is beyond category, de Haas draws on his jazz heritage, theatrical experience, and refined musicianship to illuminate the many facets of Strayhorn's legacy.

Raised in Chicago, de Haas is the son of bassist Eddie de Haas, who has performed with Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Blossom Dearie and a host of other jazz musicians, and singer Geraldine Bey de Haas, best known for her work with the highly regarded '60s vocal trio, Andy and the Bey Sisters. After launching a theatrical career in his hometown, de Haas moved to New York in 1990. He has since appeared in Kiss of the Spider Woman, Carousel, Rent, Fascinating Rhythm, Marie Christine and Dream Girls: The Concert, and experimental theater pieces, including the John Adams opera, I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, and Diedre Murray and Cornelius Eady's Running Man, for which he won an Obie award. Adam Guettel, Ricky Ian Gordon, Michael John LaChuisa and other emergent, innovative theater composers have chosen him to introduce and record their works. As a concert and cabaret artist, de Haas has sung in venues ranging from Manhattan's intimate Eighty-Eights and the Russian Tea Room, to Carnegie Hall and the Royal Festival Hall in London.

The seeds of de Haas' Strayhorn program were planted in 1999, while he was appearing with Audra McDonald in Marie Christine. "I wanted to do more concert work," he explains, "but I wasn't interested in doing material by songwriters that everybody knows. Having read David Hajdu's biography and attempted to perform "Lush Life" and a few other Strayhorn songs, I thought it would be a worthwhile challenge to put together an evening of work by a composer whom people should know better than they do. Ira Weitzman, who was producing an American songbook series at Lincoln Center, invited me to do a Strayhorn program. I spent six months researching the material and choosing accompanists. My uncle Andy Bey, who is a brilliant jazz singer-pianist, put me in touch with Herb Jordan, executor of the Strayhorn estate, who was very helpful, along with Hajdu and Strayhorn's close friend, Luther Henderson. After selecting the songs, I asked Gerry Geddes to direct the show."

"Working with five musicians, I premiered the Strayhorn program in March of 2001 at the Kaplan Penthouse, adjacent to the Juilliard School at Lincoln Center. Several months later, John Miller, who owns Arci's, a cabaret on the East Side, asked me to recreate the show for a two-week engagement. The stage was too small to accommodate a quintet, so we had to drop the guitarist and drummer, and reconfigure the arrangements for piano, bass and saxophone. Tommy Krasker, who produced all the projects that I've been involved with for Nonesuch, was enthusiastic about the program and decided that it should be recorded. He's allowed me incredible freedom to select the musicians I wanted. I knew I couldn't use just one kind of player or orchestrator. I needed to be inspired by musicians who were malleable and open to various styles rather than entrenched in jazz or musical theater."

De Haas's uncompromising artistic integrity and his adventurouesness in exploring a wide range of musical genres are reflected in his choice of Strayhorn compositions for his first solo recording. Three of the songs on this recording were written before Strayhorn met Ellington. Begun in 1933 and completed three years later, "Lush Life", with its lengthy rubato introduction and shorter, in-tempo chorus, is a prodigious creation, a testament to Strayhorn's astonishingly precocious musical and verbal sophistication. De Haas invigorates this classic, a staple in the repertoires of several generations of jazz vocalists, by presenting the opening section as a conversation with Roy Nathanson's saxophone. Inspired by the subway directions that Ellington provided Strayhorn to reach the bandleader's Harlem residence on his first visit to New York, "Take The A Train", the Ellington orchestra's most famous recording, finds de Haas freely improvising on the classic riff-tune's melody and lyrics. De Haas, who found that mastering "Blood Count" posed "a horrendous challenge," has chosen an introspective but equally heartfelt approach to Elvis Costello's poetic lyric, entitled "My Flame Burns Blue" and recorded here for the first time. Presented as a medley with "Day Dream," this intense performance concludes the album with a testement to de Haas's interpretive powers and the enduring majesty of Strayhorn's art.