Musicians loved these new fake books, but the music publishers hated them. They became an essential tool for this entire class of working musicians. These first fake books were cheaper than regular sheet music, and a lot more organized. They called them “fake books” because they helped musicians fake their way through unfamiliar songs. Someone figured out that you could gather together a bunch of Tune-Dex cards, print copies of them on sheets of paper, add a table of contents and a simple binding, and then sell the finished product directly to musicians in the form of a book. But lugging around a giant pile of paper could be really cumbersome-this is where the Tune-Dex came in. To be prepared for any request, musicians would bring stacks and stacks of sheet music to every gig. But what made the average gigging trumpeter or sax player truly valuable was their ability to play any one of hundreds of songs right there on the spot. The art of improvisation has always been a key art form of jazz music. Jazz musicians would riff and freestyle over these songs. The standard jazz repertoire was mostly well-known pop songs from Broadway, or New York’s songwriting factory: “Tin Pan Alley.” By the 1940s, a lot of “jazz” was popular dance music, and many jazz musicians were making their money playing live gigs in small clubs and bars. This abbreviated musical notation also made the cards useful to another group of people: working jazz musicians.Īs a Black art form, jazz had developed out of a mix of other Black music traditions including spirituals and the blues. On the other side of the card were a few lines of bite-sized sheet music-just the song’s melody, lyrics, and chords so that radio station employees could glance at it and quickly recall the song. On one side the cards had information about a particular song, such as the composer, the publisher, and anything that one would need to know for payment rights. The Tune-Dex was an index card catalog designed for radio station employees to keep track of the songs they were playing on air. TuneDex card via Georgia State University Library And so he invented this thing that he called the Tune-Dex,” explains Kernfeld. “A man named George Goodwin in New York City, involved in radio in the early 1940s, was getting a little frustrated with all the intricacies of tracking licensing. Kernfeld says that the story of the first fake book began in the 1940s. Kernfeld says that long before the Real Book ever came out, jazz musicians were relying on collections of music they called fake books. 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.īarry Kernfeld is a musicologist who has written a lot about the history of jazz and music piracy. The full story of how the Real Book came to be this bootleg bible of jazz is a complicated one. It was duplicated at photocopy shops and sold on street corners, out of the trunks of cars, and under the table at music stores where people used secret code words to make the exchange. It was a self-published book created without permission from music publishers or songwriters. The world’s most popular collection of jazz music was a totally unlicensed publication. It’s called the Real Book.īut 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. And inside is the sheet music for hundreds of common jazz tunes-also known as jazz “standards”-all meticulously notated by hand. It’s delightfully homemade-looking-like it was printed by a bunch of teenagers at a Kinkos. It has a peach-colored cover, a chunky, 1970s-style logo, and a black plastic binding. Since the mid-1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book.
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