Real Book

The Real Book is actually a popular jazz fake book comprised of several hundred lead sheets, most of which are standards.

The book was compiled and created by students of the Berklee College of Music by the early 1970s. The songs available in it were transcribed, a process whereby a person listens to a piece of music and writes down the melody ("head") and the chord progression. Since then the book has grown to three volumes (where the first two had been hand-written, the third one is typeset on a computer) and is available in several different editions, arranged and transposed into different keys for different instruments.

The transcriptions in the Real Book are unlicensed - no royalties are paid to the artists whose songs appear in the book. As such the book is illegal; the copies of it used to be hard to find (this situation has been significantly ameliorated with the advent of the Internet).

The Real Book has become the indispensable resource for all aspiring jazz musicians, and tunes from "The Book", as it is called (this appellation usually applies to Volume 1), are what usually gets called at jazz jams.

A legal, licensed version of a jazz fake book is available under the name of the "New Real Book", also in 3 volumes, published by Sher Music and somewhat more readily available. The collection of tunes in it diverges significantly from the original Real Book, but this edition offers some of the same songs, in new transcriptions and significantly better polygraphy.

Some other music publishers also apply the term "Real Book" to their own publications - for example, the