Looking back over the nigh century of jazz recording, the huge musical stature and canon of Edward “Duke” Ellington (1899-1974) remains as the music’s most powerful and original summation.

To hear the Ellington Orchestra live was to be uplifted not only by a unique amalgam of extraordinary musicians, many of whom had played together for decades and were unified by the maestro’s humanity and genius, but by an artistic intelligence and imagination so rarely fused across the entire realm of 20th-century culture.

Ellington was composer, arranger and orchestrator, and a pianist who grew through the stride of traditions of James P Johnston and Fats Waller to become the prompter of modernists and beboppers like Monk and Bud Powell.

But, of course, his true instrument was the orchestra itself and those brilliant men from the north and south of the US, and others from the Caribbean (who provided what he called the essential “West Indian influence”), all of whom were creatively loyal to his musical cause.

So huge is his continuing influence decades after his death that contemporary musicians are still compelled to create their own “Ellington” albums, pay their own homage and choose their own ways of saluting him.

The latest to do this is the outstanding now-times pianist Aki Takase, who has been a part of the European jazz scene since 1981, but who was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1948, raised in Tokyo and apprenticed as a jazz improviser in the US in her 1978 sojourn.

Takase is a profoundly eclectic artist whose albums include tributes to the modernist Eric Dolphy (1997), WC Handy (St Louis Blues 2001) and Fats Waller (2003). Her Ellington album, which she calls intimately My Ellington, seems an organic growth from these and the continuation of a lifetime’s journey to respect and embrace the heart of the great tradition of a hundred years of jazz achievement.

She begins with the Duke’s early “jungle” classic The Mooche and she plays it almost like a lament, with an affective emotive power which is the tone radiating from the entire album.

As she builds to a climax of pounding notes there are two whole audacious, much-travelled lives expressed here — Ellington’s and her own, and as she moves into Solitude after a witty reworking of A Little Max, where the drums are reinvented on the wood of her piano, it is as if every naked note of Ellington’s famous theme is being rediscovered by a Japanese woman born three years after the catastrophes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The sheer vulnerability of her sound stands in every phrase.

She moves between In A Mellow Tone and Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me with more directly Dukish stride and perkiness on the former and a more simple yet somehow sad-edged expression of the melodic centre throughout the latter. Caravan is played more on the cusp of its ageless theme until its pure recognition comes clipping through Takase’s restless notes.

Ellington’s end-of-session rendition of his great friend and collaborator Billy Strayhorn’s Lotus Blossom, played with bloodwarming spontaneity at the conclusion of his tribute album And His Mother Called Him Bill is remembered in Takase’s own salute to Ellington, Lotus Pond.

It is as if the note patterns are pouring directly from her head into her hands, into our ears as a mature love song.

And it moves directly into Duke’s own phrase projected onto his every audience, Love You Madly and played with panache by Takase, before it melts into the soulful theme of I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart.

The tune that became a slogan for the millions of Ellington’s impoverished listeners during the hungry decades, I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good, is carved out of the original by Takase’s pianism, with the blues a close bystander, and the chirpy Take the Coltrane, which Duke recorded with the saxophone genius of another generation in 1962, is relived within the mind and hear of a single Japanese woman exactly half a century later before Ellington’s proud dictum, It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing, is restated, the clarion call of a man who gave it its most sublime meaning.

One of Ellington’s surreal dreams of his ancestors’ great continent, Fleurette Africaine, is played by Takasi like the opening of a huge flower, and it precedes the pacy theme with a contrary meaning of unity between the orchestras of Ellington and Basie, in their joint album Battle Royal of 1961.

Then the inevitable finale, Ellington’s visitation of Japan, Ad Lib on Nippon, the final track of his marvel of a travelogue album, The Far East Suite of 1966, which Takase plays as if she is going home, home to Duke and his enormous, unfolding musical brain and beauty, concluding a rare and sumptuous session. Ellington lives!