And Hall is in the mood, even though it's after 1 a.m. and, with 17 musicians on the bus and only 12 bunks, a night of muscle spasms looms. Even though there are easier ways to travel 570 miles to the next gig. The original Duke Ellington Orchestra played Carnegie Hall and Westminster Abbey. But the current incarnation just played a luau-themed dance (complete with plastic leis) in a gym at tiny Bates College.

So he tells the guys a slightly convoluted tale about visiting a certain club in Paris. And shares a bit of gossip about one of the old-timers who was frequently too drunk to stand but invariably played a dazzling horn anyway. And recounts a sort of duel at a gig in Queens – this was after Duke had passed and his son Mercer was at the helm – where the band squared off against the Count Basie Orchestra. "We sounded like crap, man," laments Hall, a big, bearish guy from Houston. "They whupped our ass. They stomped us."

"Damn!" Best is all sympathy.

"We got even, though," Hall goes on. "We made a pact, we said never again." By the time the rivals met up again at the Hollywood Bowl, the Ellington band was tight as a ... well, exceptionally tight. "Mmm, mmm, mmm," Hall purrs. "Oh, we enjoyed that."

Rocky was there too – Quinten "Rocky" White, the drummer with the silvery dreads who now acts as the orchestra's road manager. Duke hired them both in 1973 – part of a cadre of young cats dubbed the Mod Squad – and now they regret ever grumbling about the exhausting, hour-long encores that he called for every night. "I'd take every one of 'em now and love it," Hall says. "He died a year later."

That was the first time that Hall and White have had to wonder: Could the band, led by one of America's most gifted and honored composers for nearly 50 years, play on? That first transition, from Duke's leadership to Mercer Ellington's, turned out to be the simpler one. Everyone in the jazz world knew Mercer, who'd played trumpet with the band for years and served as its road manager. But then Mercer died suddenly three years ago at 76, and his son Paul Mercer Ellington had yet to finish high school.

"There was uncertainty," is White's understatement as the bus cruises south into the night. "He was taking over an organization where everybody, to a man, had more experience than he did. Plus, I was there when Paul was born. To see that little kid running around as the guy in charge ... "

But the kid, who's now 20 and has retired to his cubicle at the rear of the bus, is the guy in charge. And the bookings continue, though not as many as he'd like. So the Duke Ellington Orchestra, still swinging, is on the road in this, the 100th anniversary year of its founder's birth.

"LIKE A ROOKIE"

"All the time I was growing up, my dad planted it in my head: 'This is your band, if you want it,' " Paul Ellington was saying, sitting in a corner of the Bates locker room before the show. Like the other musicians, he would shortly don a tux, but for now he was (still) a kid in baggy jeans and a sweater and sneaks, who'd spent the break after the sound check shooting hoops with one of the trombonists and the roadie.

The product of Mercer's second marriage, to a Danish flight attendant, Paul grew up in Copenhagen. He never knew the man he calls "Granddad," though he treasures some photographs and a watch, a gift to Duke from his right-hand genius, composer Billy Strayhorn. But the band was clearly his birthright: He began accompanying his father on tours of Europe and Japan when he was 8. At 16, the family moved to New York so that Paul could acquire a serious musical education.

By rights, he was musing, he should now be at NYU or the Manhattan School of Music, experiencing campus life, preparing to take on the legacy his name entails. When his father's death forced a decision much earlier than expected, there were those who thought that was still the way to go. "I wanted him to finish college," says Hall, who'd taken charge. "I'd run the band while he learned more about music, learned about the business. I wanted him to have the respect of musicians." Tension ensued, and when Paul took over, Hall left. "In my opinion, he was childish, and so was I," says Hall, now returned to the fold.

In Paul Ellington's first months of leading the band, he said, he felt "like a rookie coming into the NBA, someone straight from high school. No one knew what to expect." He hadn't even memorized the orchestra's charts and scores yet. But he reasoned that "it was important to keep as many of the guys that played with my dad and granddad together as possible, to keep the integrity of the music." And the best way to do that, he thought, was to have an Ellington involved.

Tonight's sound check showed, however, that this Ellington is comfortable seeking counsel from his elders. After a run-through of "All of Me," Hall pointed out that bar 82 should be played "way down, pianiss-iss-issimo," and he sang a few notes to demonstrate. So the band tried it again. "That better?" Paul asked afterward. "Barrie, you cool with that?" He was.

"I'll take all the advice I can," Paul said. "If they hear something that I don't? Please correct me, I welcome it. I tell them stuff, too, and they don't take it the wrong way, like I'm some kid trying to tell them what they already know."

They're a lively bunch on the stage a little later, sounding brassy and effervescent on "Rockin' in Rhythm," seductively blue on "Mood Indigo." At first, the students in their semiformal duds watch from tables, clapping politely at Charlie Young's sax solo and at Winston Byrd's trumpeting. Then a few brave couples take the vast floor, trying out the steps they learned at swing-dance class, possibly inspired by that Gap ad. The swing revival, however long it lasts, is A Good Thing for the band; why should neo-hipsters like Big Bad Voodoo Daddy or Brian Setzer get all the jobs and recording deals when the Duke Ellington Orchestra is still around and, not to be immodest, can play those cats under the table?

By the last set, the dance floor is thronged with kids whooping and cheering after every number. "You hear swing music is back," Rocky White snorts later, on the bus. "Back! I've been playing it for 26 years. It never went away. You just started listening."

"JIVE PRACTICES"

The night passes with men sprawled on every flat surface in the bus, including the floor. A drizzly dawn arrives somewhere around southern Connecticut. With only a couple of quickie rest stops (the bus, a 1972 Eagle on its fifth or sixth engine, has two scuzzy bathrooms that everyone tries not to use), the Stockton Performing Arts Center outside Atlantic City is about a 10-hour drive, give or take.

After a fast-food breakfast, the talk up front in the lounge turns to the rigors, the challenges, the chronic humiliations of being a working jazzman in the age of 'N Sync and Britney Spears. How the musicians' union talks about fraternity and then bounces a cat who misses his dues payment. How some snooty social club that Barrie Hall and some other cats play for annually stiffs them on food. "For 10 years they've been giving us sandwiches and potato chips," he grumps.

"That's bad," chimes in sax man Bobby LaVell.