Well, this was supposed to be a jolly book review; timed to usher in jazz festival season.

Of course, it is still timely in that respect, but jolly? This is a bitter biography which highlights the fact that fierce divisiveness is not a new thing in jazz - it's been going since the music first began to evolve. It also reminds us that one man's jazz pleasure can often be another's poison.

Jim Godbolt, who died last year aged 90, was a well-known jazz expert who managed one of the biggest bands in the trad revival of the late 1940s, worked as an agent for rock groups in the 1960s, and spent years editing the house magazines for two leading London jazz venues - Ronnie Scott's and the 100 Club.

He was also the author of several books - two volumes of memoirs (the second incorporating the first), plus the History Of Jazz In Britain 1919-1950. This final book, assembled by friends to whom he dictated new passages while he was bedridden and cursed by problems with his vision, covers his declining health (cue rants against the NHS in particular) and revisits parts of the earlier autobiography. At times, he seems to go round in circles, repeating himself (occasionally word for word), his heyday of the late 1940s proving a favourite stop-off point in the circles of memories.

Tellingly, Godbolt wrote in his opening chapter of All This And Slowly Deteriorating Fast that he was including characters from the earlier books again in this new one, "but viewed from different angles". It's soon clear that what he really meant was "now they're dead, I'll say what I really thought of them", since there is actually a fair bit of bitchiness in his comments, notably about the otherwise universally loved Humphrey Lyttelton.

Indeed, it was while reading the fourth chapter, entitled The Gentlemen Of Jazz, of this dinky, CD-square-shaped book (which comes with a compilation disc of relevant tracks) that I realized I was not warming to Godbolt. His gripe against Lyttelton, about whom he wrote at length as if the quantity of words alone suggested at least that he acknowledged his importance in British jazz, was - he claims - not personal. He blames it on Humph's "most memorable volte-face" when Godbolt says he first abandoned then publicly condemned the principles of the post-war Revivalism movement, during which young jazz musicians, including Humph himself, had revived the style and format of the original American jazz bands of the early 1920s.

But one senses that there's more to it than Godbolt's outrage at Lyttelton's decision to distance himself from trad purists.

Perhaps it was his natural charisma, or his privileged background and Eton education that made the author seethe with polite venom?

Godbolt does seem to have a chip on his shoulder about class. Indeed, he comes across as someone weighed down by shoulder chips: the chapter on his years working as an agent contains much that is fascinating about the day-to-day business of being an agent, but it is also an opportunity for Godbolt to reel off a series of gripes about misconceptions about agents, and about what agents had to put up with.

In another section, he appears to be providing a potted biography and career overview of the maverick clarinettist and composer Sandy Brown, but it soon morphs into an ill-judged moan about the fact that musicians at the bar drowned out his speech at Brown's 100 Club memorial.

He quotes one of the musicians' well-meaning attempt at an apology and adds that it "was not a great comfort for this disgruntled speaker who had spent hours working on the speech". Brown died in 1975.

It seems that Godbolt's "huff", as he himself described it, continued until his own passing.

Never mind the "Mouldy Figs" - the term used in the British scene to describe the jazz purists who battled with the beboppers in the postwar years - this memoir reeks of sour grapes. It's a great shame.