I've now read Cooke's account twice, always with the music to hand, and it's revelatory. Jazz studies of this quality are still rare, but quite a few of them are in the same Oxford series, which ought to be on every collectors' shelf.
Mervyn Cooke is Professor of Music at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom, where he teaches courses in twentieth-century music, jazz, film music and composition. An alumnus of the Royal Academy of Music and King's College Cambridge, he is the author and editor of numerous and widely translated books on jazz, film music and the life and works of Benjamin Britten.