Podcast episode on the history of the Real Book
Image of a TuneDex card, an early predecessor to the Real Book.
I first fell in love with playing piano when I discovered a Fake Book that my parents had. Fake Books were big books containing lead sheets for hundreds of unlicensed jazz tunes. The were produced and sold illicitly and the quality showed. I recall the one that I had was clearly a collection of photocopies of photocopies with each tune having distinct typesetting and many had the artifacts of many iterations of photo copying.
The excellent podcast 99% Invisible had an excellent episode back in 2021 covering the history of the Real Book, which was a project undertaken by two anonymous students at Berklee College of Music in the mid 70s to compile a — still illicit — high quality fake book reflecting the evolving way these tunes were being played.
It’s a story of early music piracy, the tension between jazz as a aural tradition vs a notational and academic art form, and more. I highly recommend it!