Tomorrow evening at an Aye Write!

session in Glasgow's Mitchell Library I shall discover whether writer Richard Havers is as modest a man as the appearance of his work would suggest. Last year, to mark the label's 75th anniversary, Thames and Hudson published a lavish tome that is the last word on the history of Blue Note. As well as including many previously unseen photographs, and critical appraisals of 75 carefully chosen albums from the back catalogue, the book tells the story of the label from its inception shortly before the Second World War through to its current existence under the curator-ship of president Don Was, under well-shaped chapter headings.

Yet although Blue Note is almost as famous for its memorable album covers as what is in the grooves, the name of the author appears nowhere on the front of Uncompromising Expression (the title derived from a passage in Blue Note's 1939 manifesto that Don Was holds dear). Richard Havers may have written "around 50" books, and edits the Universal music group's website udiscovermusic.com, but you have to look hard for his name anywhere. When I ask him about the content of the book he is similarly modest. "To be honest, there is very little original research," he says, although that turns out to be somewhat less than the truth.

Havers was a music fan working in the airline industry before he took his first steps into writing about his hobby. He worked his way from being a British Caledonian message boy at Gatwick to the presidency of European Continental Airlines before he was 40, and then started writing advertising copy, jingles and radio ads. Sidetracked into producing concerts for The Beach Boys and Paul McCartney, he found himself playing charity cricket with Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman and roped into his radio history of the blues. That became a two-hour television show, Bill Wyman's Blues Odyssey, which begat a book of the same title, and another milestone in Havers' journey. His name appeared on that, alongside Wyman's, but not on the ghost-written biographies of Gary Barlow and Tony Visconti that followed. His subsequent work has included a biography of Frank Sinatra and the Thames and Hudson book on the Verve label which preceded the Blue Note one. He has now turned his attention to the vast archive of EMI, and says blandly of his work on the website (which has 750,000 unique hits each month): "I'm agnostic about the music we cover."

Which is odd, because he sounds passionate talking about Blue Note. His enthusiasm convinced the gate-keeper of the Blue Note archive Michael Cuscuna to provide revealing contact sheets that illustrate exactly how the iconic images on Blue Note album sleeves were chosen, and Havers was committed enough to seek out 92-year-old Paul Bacon, whose sleeve art preceded that of the more celebrated Reid Miles.

"Reid Miles was better and more ground-breaking [and also, Havers reveals, no fan of jazz], but it was great to meet Bacon at The Hot Club of Newark," he says. That gathering of elderly jazz fans to listen to records turns out to be very like the Glasgow Rhythm Club, which met until fairly recent years in the Society of Musicians on Berkeley Street, just round the corner from the Mitchell, and is a precursor to the Classic Album Sundays hi-fidelity listening sessions that have been a feature of recent Glasgow Jazz Festivals.

Havers is also full of opinions about the motivation of the creators of the Blue Note label, and the way its achievements have been chronicled in the past.

"Alfred Lion didn't make any real money from Blue Note until he eventually sold out, but in his mind jazz music was linked to the desire to create a better world, So he ran the label in a fair and equitable way."

That meant that a man who had fled a Nazi Germany which hated both Jews and jazz, and found support and finance for his new recording project among those of left-wing views in the US, paid his musicians for their work, and made sure it was captured as well as the current technology would allow, and presented to the public in a marketable form.

"There have been thousands of pages of Blue Note discography, and in particular Richard Cook's very thorough book of 20 years ago, but he gave a view of

Blue Note very much as he saw it. I've tried to be more objective. I don't much like Andrew Hill and Cecil Taylor, but I can see why others make their case. I think Donald Byrd and Lou Donaldson are important as they were the link to hip-hop that jazz needed to keep it going."

So, although Havers gives ample space to the genesis of the label, the early 1950s sessions by a young Miles Davis and the crucial role of idiosyncratic piano genius Thelonius Monk, he comes right up to date and points out that hit albums by Norah Jones pay for the work of pianist Robert Glasper, whose trio plays one of the Hub Sessions in the new strand at this year's Edinburgh International Festival. And he has no problems with Don Was putting out records by Roseanne Cash or Elvis Costello's partnership with Questlove of The Roots on Wise Up Ghost.

"When Alfred Lion met Sydney Bechet in Berlin, hot jazz was the punk rock of the time. The classic Blue Notes have sold many more copies recently than they ever did at the time: it really was a proper indie label."

*Richard Havers appears at Aye Write! tomorrow at 7.30pm, with music by Trio Verso.