Authorship Disputes and Uncredited Contributions

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Legal entitlement to authorship credits and royalties can be convoluted, as demonstrated by the case of Lawrence Brown's signature melody in Sophisticated Lady. The case highlights how individuals like Duke Ellington's manager Irving Mills could use their power to claim songwriting credits and royalties. Often, the official credits do not reflect the actual contributors, leading to ongoing authorship disputes in the music industry. Despite the legalization of music books like the How Leonard Reel book, many musicians, such as Brown, may never receive recognition for their creative contributions.

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.