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The Real Book (2021)

Since the mid-1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book. It has a peach-colored cover, a chunky, 1970s-style logo, and a black plastic binding. It’s delightfully homemade-looking—like it was printed by a bunch of teenagers at a Kinkos. And inside is the sheet music for hundreds of common jazz tunes—also

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. The Real Book had taken on a life of its own, and the students ironically found themselves in the same position as the music publishers and songwriters they’d originally cut out of the process, as they watched unlicensed copies of their work get duplicated and sold. Nicholas Payton is a musician and record label owner, and he compares the Real Book to a study guide or a cheat sheet—a way to distill this complicated art form into a manageable packet of digestible information.

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