In the early days of jazz, musicians would be playing in a club and receive requests, Broadway hits were popular, and have to search through their mountain of sheet music for the song, which they’d then improvise on top of. Some people started making stripped-down versions of the sheet music, not enough to reproduce the original but enough to riff off. Those might have been legal in their original incarnation? And then people started collecting those in “fake books”, which were much more convenient to carry around than a mountain of sheet music. Those definitely weren’t legal.
They also kind of sucked, they were often wrong and they were outdated, both in terms of what songs they included and in terms of how they were played. Jazz had evolved, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, and the fake books hadn’t.
(I don’t think the show ever said why not, or treated that as an interesting question?)
(I think it was here we heard two versions of a song from Snow White. I couldn’t have told you that the jazz version was the same song. Though, listening on 2x probably didn’t help.)
Some students at Berkeley Music College in Boston approached their teacher with an idea to create a new fake book, updated for the 1970s. He hesitated because illegal and because people getting money for their work is good, but decided it would be worth it. They called it The Real Book, printed out a few hundred copies themselves, then those started getting copied all over the world. The teacher in question said the music quality when he’d walk down the hall improved, people were now playing the right things.
No one could compete legally with The Real Book because they couldn’t get the rights to all those songs. But then someone did get the rights to almost all those songs, and printed a legal version. They kept basically the same design and made a digital font of the original handwriting. Today The Real Book is basically essential for jazz musicians. (Has it been updated since the 1970s?)
Some hand-wringing about how the person who has legal credit as songwriter might not have been the actual songwriter. Some criticism that The Real Book has essentially become canonical in a genre that shouldn’t have canon. Some opining that you can’t learn jazz from a book, you have to study with other jazz players.
Reporter eventually managed to get an email exchange with one of the original students, who did the handwriting. He wants to stay anonymous basically because it’s fun. Agrees with the criticism and the opining. Thinks the digital font isn’t very good.
99% Invisible #438 (7 Apr 2021): The Real Book
In the early days of jazz, musicians would be playing in a club and receive requests, Broadway hits were popular, and have to search through their mountain of sheet music for the song, which they’d then improvise on top of. Some people started making stripped-down versions of the sheet music, not enough to reproduce the original but enough to riff off. Those might have been legal in their original incarnation? And then people started collecting those in “fake books”, which were much more convenient to carry around than a mountain of sheet music. Those definitely weren’t legal.
They also kind of sucked, they were often wrong and they were outdated, both in terms of what songs they included and in terms of how they were played. Jazz had evolved, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, and the fake books hadn’t.
(I don’t think the show ever said why not, or treated that as an interesting question?)
(I think it was here we heard two versions of a song from Snow White. I couldn’t have told you that the jazz version was the same song. Though, listening on 2x probably didn’t help.)
Some students at Berkeley Music College in Boston approached their teacher with an idea to create a new fake book, updated for the 1970s. He hesitated because illegal and because people getting money for their work is good, but decided it would be worth it. They called it The Real Book, printed out a few hundred copies themselves, then those started getting copied all over the world. The teacher in question said the music quality when he’d walk down the hall improved, people were now playing the right things.
No one could compete legally with The Real Book because they couldn’t get the rights to all those songs. But then someone did get the rights to almost all those songs, and printed a legal version. They kept basically the same design and made a digital font of the original handwriting. Today The Real Book is basically essential for jazz musicians. (Has it been updated since the 1970s?)
Some hand-wringing about how the person who has legal credit as songwriter might not have been the actual songwriter. Some criticism that The Real Book has essentially become canonical in a genre that shouldn’t have canon. Some opining that you can’t learn jazz from a book, you have to study with other jazz players.
Reporter eventually managed to get an email exchange with one of the original students, who did the handwriting. He wants to stay anonymous basically because it’s fun. Agrees with the criticism and the opining. Thinks the digital font isn’t very good.