This could pose a problem if someone was reading from the book while another person was playing or singing from memory, or if someone was using the book as a reference. Here is the chart for the Jimmy Van Heusen tune Like Someone In Love: In some cases, a standard tune was presented in The Real Book with alternate chord changes in place of the original chord progression with no indication that they are alternate changes. Why would anyone want to use that book? And it’s not that The Real Book wanted to simplify songs for people to learn, like a Cliff’s Notes thing for musicians in fact, the original Real Book’s charts were typically more complicated than the original tunes, sometimes in ways that were completely arbitrary. The closest nonmusical analogy I can think of is if a imperfectly translated collection of poems became the standard versions of those poems in English, even though the original poems were also in English. They are still everywhere, and we need to be done with them. But first we need to address those bootleg editions.

We’ll talk about the Sixth Edition in a bit. It also does not include the lyrics of any tunes, so if you are working with a singer who also wants to read the tune, you’re going to need a different book anyway. The legal Sixth Edition fixed many of these problems, but in doing so the new editors have made the Sixth Edition incompatible with older versions, and the Sixth Edition still contains more than a few questionably transcribed chord changes and melodies. I am writing this to convince you to stop using The Real Book, specifically. The charts in the bootleg version – widely available on the internet and still very common in print form among musicians my age and older – are inconsistent, sloppy and frequently inaccurate.

I am not out to convince anyone not to use fake books or lead sheets. But lead sheets are good for a number of reasons and I appreciate having them around.

It’s a bad look to read from a book at a public jam session, at least in New York City. Some people are against using fake books like The Real Book because people think they are a crutch, or a cheap ways to learn tunes, and books like The Real Book are frequently unwelcome at jam sessions because Come On Dude, Learn The Tune. I would guess that every “jazz” musician reading this has had access to a copy of The Real Book at some point. You can find it at gigs, in high schools and colleges, at jam sessions, and in people’s homes for their personal practice and reference. Despite being 40 years old – and having been underground most of its life – it’s the most common fake book that I know of.

It contains lead sheets for over a thousand songs across three handwritten volumes that went through 5 bootleg revisions before being legitimized as the “Sixth Edition” by Hal Leonard in 2003. Some exposition, briefly : The Real Book is a fake book that was most likely compiled by anonymous Berklee students in the 1970s.

Real book volume 5 pdf