The Value of Fake Books in Jazz Music

1min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Jazz musicians thrived on improvisation but were valued for their ability to play a wide repertoire. In the 1940s, musicians fulfilled song requests at gigs, carrying stacks of sheet music. To streamline this process, tune decks were created, printed on paper with a table of contents and binding, known as fake books. These fake books revolutionized the music industry, providing organized and affordable song collections for musicians to navigate unfamiliar tunes easily.

Since the mid-1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book. It has a peach-colored cover, a chunky, 1970s-style logo, and a black plastic binding. It’s delightfully homemade-looking—like it was printed by a bunch of teenagers at a Kinkos. And inside is the sheet music for hundreds of common jazz tunes—also known as jazz “standards”—all meticulously notated by hand. It’s called the Real Book. But if you were going to music school in the 1970s, you couldn’t just buy a copy of the Real Book at the campus bookstore. Because the Real Book... was illegal. The world’s most popular collection of Jazz music was a totally unlicensed publication. The full story of how the Real Book came to be this bootleg bible of jazz is a complicated one. It’s a story about what happens when an insurgent, improvisational art form like Jazz gets codified and becomes something that you can learn from a book.

The Real Book

This episode originally aired in April 2021

Roman note: I love this episode. An all time favorite. Pass it along to someone jazzy if so inclined.