As an aside, fake books are a great way to get your feet wet learning how to extemporize while still having some guidance around the chord progression and melody.
If you have an iPad, there's an app called iReal Pro with loads of lead sheets that add in some accompaniment (drums, guitar, etc.) so you can "play along" as well.
iReal Pro is awesome. When playing music with new people (especially jazz), it feels like everyone has it, and you can quickly make sure you're playing the same charts.
It's also available on Android, and it's a one-time payment, no-subscription app. Easily one of the most valuable music purchases I've made.
iReal Pro is a great resource, but what it provides are not lead sheets, they are just chord charts. Lead sheets have the melody of the song in standard notation, along with chord names and sometimes lyrics. iReal Pro's charts give chord names only.
I get very frustrated with cats on the stage who rely too much on the iReal Pro. If they don't know the melody, then they easily get lost when, for instance, an intro or other section is skipped (such as when the singer re-enters on the bridge after solos), and in general their comping tends to not be aware of how the melody fits in with the changes. At least when reading a leadsheet, readers know how the melody and harmony interact and can better play fills around the melody.
Indeed it's worth mentioning, to a general audience, that iRealPro only displays the harmonies (chord changes) for tunes, and not melodies. Whereas, "fake books" include both melody and harmony.
The reason is that copyright only covers melody and lyrics, not harmony. So the harmonies are essentially public domain.
This was true of the real book too. Quite a lot of the songs have incorrect transcriptions, sometimes they use a different key than the original, or the "original" key when a different one is more commonly heard. All editions of it I've seen have this to a significant extent, of course with differences making it even more confusion sometimes.
And a lot of natural variation has been elided with these tools, a lot of jazz classics I'm pretty sure didn't really have a "standard" version until after the real book took over; different fake books were popular in different cities and so there was regional performance variation that we don't see much of anymore.
There are probably novel issues introduced by the ireal fakes but a lot of them are the same problems my grandfather was observing as a young working musician when the real book became so dominant. They are extremely real downsides of these tools though.
The Real Book was pretty fundamental helping me learn jazz. I think a lot of jazz people look down on it (or those who need it), but I didn't really get deep enough to see that. There's a short video from Adam Neely that opened my eyes to that a bit.
I'm a jazz bassist, 61, and first saw a Real Book 43 years ago.
There were, and are, always a few hard-liners who look down on reading tunes from a book, on the bandstand. They're not necessarily the oldest, or best players, or have the best reasons. Whatever. Most of the gigs that I've played, fake books were accepted. There are similar debates in most musical styles.
Roughly 20 years ago, I decided to stop bringing fake books to gigs. I quickly discovered that I didn't need them. For one thing, the "local repertoire" wasn't vast. For another, it exercised my ability to pick up tunes by ear. I see more of what's around me, and interact more with the band and audience, because the music stand isn't there. Today, I have a bunch of stuff on an Android tablet that I keep in my bag just in case, but rarely bring it out. The tablet also contains stuff for bands that use written arrangements, such as a 19-piece jazz ensemble.
I personally think the inaccuracies are immaterial. Most players will never encounter a situation where the ur-text is important. The players I've known who mostly learned by ear don't play 100% accurate changes.
I'm not a full time pro, but am often called as a sub, so I've observed many levels of bands. I've formed the opinion that the fake books do in fact detract from performances. I hate "dead air" between tunes while the players flip through their books (or thumb through their phones) to choose what tune to play next. It's a little bit cringe when a good player who should know a beginner tune, reads it. Flipping through the books may be just a habit. Plus, dependence on the books limits the repertoire in weird ways. Real Book has practically become its own genre. Remember, the "contemporary" tunes in the RB are 50+ years old.
The problem is that gigs and jam sessions are no longer frequent enough to afford players a chance of learning tunes by ear. The books aren't going away. Bandleaders can figure out how to deliver a better performance. Send out a set list in advance. Let people listen to the tunes that they're unfamiliar with. If needed, they can transcribe them. I do that a lot when asked for a popular tune that doesn't have available sheet music, such as most country-western.
If the band is flipping through their books, paper or electronic, to choose what tune to play next, that isn't a performance worthy of the term. It's a jam session. Which is fine, but hopefully nobody is paying to listen to it.
I agree, but sometimes you don't know all of the details of a gig before agreeing to play, especially since I'm not the top call bassist in my locale. Then you put on the best show you can under the circumstances.
I feel like that commenter was a little harsh with that statement - I will say however that it has caught some flak as a source of truth. There are quite a few standards (principally, original jazz compositions by jazz musicians that have now become "standards", this probably isn't as much a problem for true "Great American Songbook" standards since those were always notated), that were transcribed incorrectly in original versions of real/fake books. To the point that many younger generation players are playing incorrect heads and/or changes to tunes since they learn it from the book rather than by ear. Not even that, but often they are just straight wrong, or dumbed down versions of the changes.
Anybody who's worked with it for any length of time knows that the charts contained are good enough for jam session purposes but either contain inaccuracies when compared to the canonical versions of songs or may have been based on the "wrong" (according to some) canonical versions. Working this out means developing your ears and listening both to the original recordings and to the musicians you're playing with in a given situation. Many people end up in a place where they're just using their ears and memory to skip the book entirely, which in some situations is an essential skill.
Most level-headed people I think regard the book as a useful tool, a step in the growth journey. As egos and insecurities enter the mix you'll occasionally find somebody who'll proclaim that the Real Book is purely a crutch and you should start and end with the ear-training bits or you're "doing it wrong".
The Real Book is an excellent resource for what it is. However since it is the primary book of jazz, it can have too much of an influence. The Real Book has a limited number of songs and entire subgenres of jazz are not represented. The structure of the songs is relatively narrow. Songs are rarely added.
There are now six volumes of Real Books from Hal Leonard, plus a several others organized around genres or artists, plus the Sher Music books. A few thousand songs. Not every player has every book, but they are all available. Most songs are available for purchase for a few dollars each as downloadable PDFs.
Guy decides to go deep into Africa up the Congo River. After getting to the last easily accessible entry into the river, they board the smallish boat to begin the arduous trek deep into darkest Africa.
A day or three into the journey they start hearing distant drums, then as they continued after some days it got slowly louder. The guy started getting spooked and asks the Captain, "What's up with those drums?"
The Captain replies, "Don't worry. Everything's perfectly fine so long as they continue."
After more days of journeying, suddenly, one night, the drums just stop cold.
Fearfully, the guy inquires, "WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?!"
A married couple hasn't spoken to each other in 10 years. Their daughter seeks out the best marriage counselor she can find and gets her parents to agree to go to a session.
After their first visit the daughter follows up with the therapist and asks if he could get them to talk to each other. "Not this time, but we have another appointment next week. I'll take another crack at it."
The parents show up to their next appointment. The therapist is trying everything he can think of to get them to speak to each other. Because he has a reputation to uphold he's getting a little worried. He tells the daughter, "We've got another appointment next week and I've got one last thing I can try."
When the married couple steps into the therapist's office, therapist doesn't say a word but pulls out an upright bass out of his closet and starts playing a solo. They immediately start talking.
My joke has more to do with the fact that bass players tend to feel unappreciated when the audience talks during their solo. Bass solos are always quieter so, there's some sort of bias there I'm sure.
Recently at a jazz club a bass player friend of mine who graduated from the same music school as me found ourselves talking through the bass solo from the act on stage. "Oh man, we're doing it now." Lol
This drummer is sick of everyone ribbing him about not being a real musician, so he goes to the music shop to buy a proper instrument.
He says to the owner "I'd like to see some guitars, please".
The owner says "you must be a drummer".
The drummer says "How did you know that?".
The owner says "This is a fish shop".
The drummer wanders down the street and finally finds the music shop. He's in there for hours, overwhelmed by the choice, weighing up all the different options.
After much thought, he musters up all of his courage and says to the owner "I'd like the big red trumpet and that accordion over there".
The owner says "Well, you can have the fire extinguisher, but I can't sell you the radiator".
This brings up a lot of memories. I got lost on the way to jazz school and studied CS instead. Still went to school on a partial music scholarship. Wound-up playing so much anyway that it killed my grades. Worked out in the end, lol.
If you have a copy of the "illegal" Real Book you'll notice that there are a lot of Steve Swallow tunes in there :-)
There are definitely people that look down on using the Real Books/iReal as a crutch. IMHO it's not a huge deal. But, it is widely encouraged to learn as many commonly called tunes as you can though. You can find lists of those in various places: https://www.shermusic.com/1883217040.php and https://www.shermusic.com/1883217482.php for example. The reason for that honestly is that you will find yourself in a scenario where something called isn't in your book. Popular chord changes get re-used a lot, so the more material you know can help you "figure out" the unknown tune quickly. Called tune just rhythm changes? Blues changes? So What/Impressions changes? etc.
It's insane to think that so many owe so much to an contraband book.
There's a very good podcast about (music) copyright and how it's used and abused. The podcast is mainly about Men At Work's "Down Under" and the crazy copyright case that hit them: https://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-xqda4-23ebff8b
Someone I know who went to Berklee in the early 90s said that it was a required text for certain jazz classes, and you had to buy it from a bootlegger.
I was at Berklee in the late 80s and that's a pretty accurate statement both for the requirement and procurement.
Your friend was there close enough to the time that I was there that it was probably the same thing. There was "a guy" that hung out around the school... I'd usually see him somewhere around the intersection of Mass Ave and Boylston... And he was known as the guy to talk to if you wanted a real book (and probably other stuff as well). Every once in a while you'd see him just running off down the street like he was being chased or something (never saw a pursuer) though it was said every once in a while they'd try and busy him.
I didn't actually get my copy from him ... My high school band teacher was a pretty accomplished bebop guy that burned out playing in the house bands in Vegas and "retired" to teaching.... So he hooked those students of his up that had an interest in small group playing or gigging. So had my copy before going to Berklee.
I remember a friend managed to get a copy of a real book in the 90s and was so excited about it. When I sat down to play some tunes out of it, I was unfamiliar with the notation where Cmin7 was written C-7 and CMaj7 was C△. I figured out the latter, but thought the former was Cdim7 which led to some weird harmonizations before I figured it out.
The lack of agreement on how to spell chord symbols is a genuine problem. Brandt and Roemer's 1976 Standardized Chord Symbol Notation provides a reasonable standard, which was adopted by Sher Music in their "New Real" line of books, but it's not quite the same as the style chosen by the original Real Book authors that was mostly kept in the Hal Leonard editions. iRealPro uses a slightly different style. Chord chart readers have to be prepared for a variety of styles, unfortunately.
I went to school in Minnesota and we had to go to a certain music store and ask a specific employee for the book. I believe it was $50. It was basically required to play jazz.
As an aside, fake books are a great way to get your feet wet learning how to extemporize while still having some guidance around the chord progression and melody.
If you have an iPad, there's an app called iReal Pro with loads of lead sheets that add in some accompaniment (drums, guitar, etc.) so you can "play along" as well.
https://www.irealpro.com
iReal Pro is awesome. When playing music with new people (especially jazz), it feels like everyone has it, and you can quickly make sure you're playing the same charts.
It's also available on Android, and it's a one-time payment, no-subscription app. Easily one of the most valuable music purchases I've made.
it's also great being able to change tempo, style, key, etc. iReal Pro is used by every pro musician i know around town
iReal Pro is a great resource, but what it provides are not lead sheets, they are just chord charts. Lead sheets have the melody of the song in standard notation, along with chord names and sometimes lyrics. iReal Pro's charts give chord names only.
I get very frustrated with cats on the stage who rely too much on the iReal Pro. If they don't know the melody, then they easily get lost when, for instance, an intro or other section is skipped (such as when the singer re-enters on the bridge after solos), and in general their comping tends to not be aware of how the melody fits in with the changes. At least when reading a leadsheet, readers know how the melody and harmony interact and can better play fills around the melody.
Indeed it's worth mentioning, to a general audience, that iRealPro only displays the harmonies (chord changes) for tunes, and not melodies. Whereas, "fake books" include both melody and harmony.
The reason is that copyright only covers melody and lyrics, not harmony. So the harmonies are essentially public domain.
iReal pro is the new real book
For good and for bad. Its strengths are available to all and its gaps (melody!) and quirks (lack of variation) impact everyone’s development.
This was true of the real book too. Quite a lot of the songs have incorrect transcriptions, sometimes they use a different key than the original, or the "original" key when a different one is more commonly heard. All editions of it I've seen have this to a significant extent, of course with differences making it even more confusion sometimes.
And a lot of natural variation has been elided with these tools, a lot of jazz classics I'm pretty sure didn't really have a "standard" version until after the real book took over; different fake books were popular in different cities and so there was regional performance variation that we don't see much of anymore.
There are probably novel issues introduced by the ireal fakes but a lot of them are the same problems my grandfather was observing as a young working musician when the real book became so dominant. They are extremely real downsides of these tools though.
Yep, it’s just the learning process. But when there’s a monoculture of learning tools, the downsides can become a communal gap.
A looper pedal and an AirStep Play are helpful antidotes for me.
[dead]
This seems to be another embodiment of Gabe Newell's "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem."
Threads 4 and 2 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34536638
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26737142
99% invisible is one of my most favourite podcasts, I recommend it every time when I talk about podcasts to someone
It's the first podcast I ever heard of, when my friend first explained that word to me. Glad to see it's still around.
The Real Book was pretty fundamental helping me learn jazz. I think a lot of jazz people look down on it (or those who need it), but I didn't really get deep enough to see that. There's a short video from Adam Neely that opened my eyes to that a bit.
https://youtu.be/dD0e5e6wI_A?feature=shared
Who looks down on the Real Book?
I'm a jazz bassist, 61, and first saw a Real Book 43 years ago.
There were, and are, always a few hard-liners who look down on reading tunes from a book, on the bandstand. They're not necessarily the oldest, or best players, or have the best reasons. Whatever. Most of the gigs that I've played, fake books were accepted. There are similar debates in most musical styles.
Roughly 20 years ago, I decided to stop bringing fake books to gigs. I quickly discovered that I didn't need them. For one thing, the "local repertoire" wasn't vast. For another, it exercised my ability to pick up tunes by ear. I see more of what's around me, and interact more with the band and audience, because the music stand isn't there. Today, I have a bunch of stuff on an Android tablet that I keep in my bag just in case, but rarely bring it out. The tablet also contains stuff for bands that use written arrangements, such as a 19-piece jazz ensemble.
I personally think the inaccuracies are immaterial. Most players will never encounter a situation where the ur-text is important. The players I've known who mostly learned by ear don't play 100% accurate changes.
I'm not a full time pro, but am often called as a sub, so I've observed many levels of bands. I've formed the opinion that the fake books do in fact detract from performances. I hate "dead air" between tunes while the players flip through their books (or thumb through their phones) to choose what tune to play next. It's a little bit cringe when a good player who should know a beginner tune, reads it. Flipping through the books may be just a habit. Plus, dependence on the books limits the repertoire in weird ways. Real Book has practically become its own genre. Remember, the "contemporary" tunes in the RB are 50+ years old.
The problem is that gigs and jam sessions are no longer frequent enough to afford players a chance of learning tunes by ear. The books aren't going away. Bandleaders can figure out how to deliver a better performance. Send out a set list in advance. Let people listen to the tunes that they're unfamiliar with. If needed, they can transcribe them. I do that a lot when asked for a popular tune that doesn't have available sheet music, such as most country-western.
If the band is flipping through their books, paper or electronic, to choose what tune to play next, that isn't a performance worthy of the term. It's a jam session. Which is fine, but hopefully nobody is paying to listen to it.
I agree, but sometimes you don't know all of the details of a gig before agreeing to play, especially since I'm not the top call bassist in my locale. Then you put on the best show you can under the circumstances.
I feel like that commenter was a little harsh with that statement - I will say however that it has caught some flak as a source of truth. There are quite a few standards (principally, original jazz compositions by jazz musicians that have now become "standards", this probably isn't as much a problem for true "Great American Songbook" standards since those were always notated), that were transcribed incorrectly in original versions of real/fake books. To the point that many younger generation players are playing incorrect heads and/or changes to tunes since they learn it from the book rather than by ear. Not even that, but often they are just straight wrong, or dumbed down versions of the changes.
Actually… this is true. Fair enough.
Anybody who's worked with it for any length of time knows that the charts contained are good enough for jam session purposes but either contain inaccuracies when compared to the canonical versions of songs or may have been based on the "wrong" (according to some) canonical versions. Working this out means developing your ears and listening both to the original recordings and to the musicians you're playing with in a given situation. Many people end up in a place where they're just using their ears and memory to skip the book entirely, which in some situations is an essential skill.
Most level-headed people I think regard the book as a useful tool, a step in the growth journey. As egos and insecurities enter the mix you'll occasionally find somebody who'll proclaim that the Real Book is purely a crutch and you should start and end with the ear-training bits or you're "doing it wrong".
The Real Book is an excellent resource for what it is. However since it is the primary book of jazz, it can have too much of an influence. The Real Book has a limited number of songs and entire subgenres of jazz are not represented. The structure of the songs is relatively narrow. Songs are rarely added.
There are now six volumes of Real Books from Hal Leonard, plus a several others organized around genres or artists, plus the Sher Music books. A few thousand songs. Not every player has every book, but they are all available. Most songs are available for purchase for a few dollars each as downloadable PDFs.
One of my favorite jokes:
Guy decides to go deep into Africa up the Congo River. After getting to the last easily accessible entry into the river, they board the smallish boat to begin the arduous trek deep into darkest Africa.
A day or three into the journey they start hearing distant drums, then as they continued after some days it got slowly louder. The guy started getting spooked and asks the Captain, "What's up with those drums?"
The Captain replies, "Don't worry. Everything's perfectly fine so long as they continue."
After more days of journeying, suddenly, one night, the drums just stop cold.
Fearfully, the guy inquires, "WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?!"
The Captain replies, "Bass solo."
A married couple hasn't spoken to each other in 10 years. Their daughter seeks out the best marriage counselor she can find and gets her parents to agree to go to a session.
After their first visit the daughter follows up with the therapist and asks if he could get them to talk to each other. "Not this time, but we have another appointment next week. I'll take another crack at it."
The parents show up to their next appointment. The therapist is trying everything he can think of to get them to speak to each other. Because he has a reputation to uphold he's getting a little worried. He tells the daughter, "We've got another appointment next week and I've got one last thing I can try."
When the married couple steps into the therapist's office, therapist doesn't say a word but pulls out an upright bass out of his closet and starts playing a solo. They immediately start talking.
You two! Bass solos can be great!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it0PN8RrEZI
I am a bass player sir.
My joke has more to do with the fact that bass players tend to feel unappreciated when the audience talks during their solo. Bass solos are always quieter so, there's some sort of bias there I'm sure.
Recently at a jazz club a bass player friend of mine who graduated from the same music school as me found ourselves talking through the bass solo from the act on stage. "Oh man, we're doing it now." Lol
Thanks, I've never heard of them before. Excellent.
For whatever reason, we love this session by this incredible jazz band:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pYHCGYJbw0
"Enjoy." --Daniel Tosh
bass is actually short for "basically not an instrument"
This drummer is sick of everyone ribbing him about not being a real musician, so he goes to the music shop to buy a proper instrument.
He says to the owner "I'd like to see some guitars, please".
The owner says "you must be a drummer".
The drummer says "How did you know that?".
The owner says "This is a fish shop".
The drummer wanders down the street and finally finds the music shop. He's in there for hours, overwhelmed by the choice, weighing up all the different options.
After much thought, he musters up all of his courage and says to the owner "I'd like the big red trumpet and that accordion over there".
The owner says "Well, you can have the fire extinguisher, but I can't sell you the radiator".
This brings up a lot of memories. I got lost on the way to jazz school and studied CS instead. Still went to school on a partial music scholarship. Wound-up playing so much anyway that it killed my grades. Worked out in the end, lol.
If you have a copy of the "illegal" Real Book you'll notice that there are a lot of Steve Swallow tunes in there :-)
There are definitely people that look down on using the Real Books/iReal as a crutch. IMHO it's not a huge deal. But, it is widely encouraged to learn as many commonly called tunes as you can though. You can find lists of those in various places: https://www.shermusic.com/1883217040.php and https://www.shermusic.com/1883217482.php for example. The reason for that honestly is that you will find yourself in a scenario where something called isn't in your book. Popular chord changes get re-used a lot, so the more material you know can help you "figure out" the unknown tune quickly. Called tune just rhythm changes? Blues changes? So What/Impressions changes? etc.
It's insane to think that so many owe so much to an contraband book.
There's a very good podcast about (music) copyright and how it's used and abused. The podcast is mainly about Men At Work's "Down Under" and the crazy copyright case that hit them: https://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-xqda4-23ebff8b
It brings me so much happiness that there is enough overlap between software people and jazz playing people that this is on the front page
Someone I know who went to Berklee in the early 90s said that it was a required text for certain jazz classes, and you had to buy it from a bootlegger.
I was at Berklee in the late 80s and that's a pretty accurate statement both for the requirement and procurement.
Your friend was there close enough to the time that I was there that it was probably the same thing. There was "a guy" that hung out around the school... I'd usually see him somewhere around the intersection of Mass Ave and Boylston... And he was known as the guy to talk to if you wanted a real book (and probably other stuff as well). Every once in a while you'd see him just running off down the street like he was being chased or something (never saw a pursuer) though it was said every once in a while they'd try and busy him.
I didn't actually get my copy from him ... My high school band teacher was a pretty accomplished bebop guy that burned out playing in the house bands in Vegas and "retired" to teaching.... So he hooked those students of his up that had an interest in small group playing or gigging. So had my copy before going to Berklee.
I remember a friend managed to get a copy of a real book in the 90s and was so excited about it. When I sat down to play some tunes out of it, I was unfamiliar with the notation where Cmin7 was written C-7 and CMaj7 was C△. I figured out the latter, but thought the former was Cdim7 which led to some weird harmonizations before I figured it out.
The lack of agreement on how to spell chord symbols is a genuine problem. Brandt and Roemer's 1976 Standardized Chord Symbol Notation provides a reasonable standard, which was adopted by Sher Music in their "New Real" line of books, but it's not quite the same as the style chosen by the original Real Book authors that was mostly kept in the Hal Leonard editions. iRealPro uses a slightly different style. Chord chart readers have to be prepared for a variety of styles, unfortunately.
A lot of opinionated variations on chord spellings, too, with tritone subs sometimes included or not, 7b9s represented different ways, etc.
I went to school in Minnesota and we had to go to a certain music store and ask a specific employee for the book. I believe it was $50. It was basically required to play jazz.
I remember when my brother (a teenager at the time) bought his book he had to give his music teachers name and the employee called for a reference.