The Real Book - Volume 1

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A good collection of Jazz Standards - Rated
Their have been several criticisms made against the new 6th edition Real Books and its fair that some of them stand. However with the exception of PDF version 5th editions out their its not actually that easy to obtain the older versions in paper book format any more and actually not that practical to print off the PDF versions. The new legal versions do have some tunes missing, i'd dissagree with the previous reviewer that stated their was over 100 missing however i noted that one or two of my personal favourites were missing from the new edition. Having said that, their are still loads of great standards to be found in the 6th ed Real Book as well as a few totally new tunes. One improvement i found as trombonist is that the new edition bass clef volumes are correctly written within the range of the trombone, something which the 5th edition was notoriously bad at. The books are also not really very expensive to buy and the print and format is very clear. Some tunes have been changed to the correct keys, some tunes have been reharmonized, that last point has a few people up in arms because some of the chord changes in the 5th Ed were actually quite sweet, time will tell if the Hal Leonard Corp has got this right or not but my bet is we'll be seeing a 7th edition in the not to distant future to alter mistakes in the 6th Ed. I'm still recommending this collection because it has such a large collection of jazz standards, its not perfect but at least its now legal and worth having in your gig bag.

They should call it the 2/3 edition - Rated
While it is nice that you can now legally buy several well-done fake books, by its title and cover art this book suggests that it is an improvement upon the original (illegal) real book.

In some ways the book may be an improvement but in one very important way the suggestion is very misleading. I did the count; of the 443 songs in the original Real Book, 141 are absent in this edition. True, some of these maybe should not have been in the original real book to begin with, but among the absent are many songs that my own friends play often; A Foggy Day, All in Love is Fair, Alone Together, As Time Goes By, Corcovado, The Days of Wine and Roses, Desafinado, Goodbye Porkpie Hat, In Your Own Sweet Way, Just Friends, The More I See You, Night and Day, Shadow of Your Smile, Spring is Here, They Can't Take That Away, Walkin', What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life, What is this thing called love.

The most important reason to own a fake book is so you can bring it to a gig as a safety net -- as long as the other musicians call songs from the real book you can fake them. That doesn't work very well if one out of every three times you have to say, "sorry, can't do this one".

I bought this book because I prefer to do things legally and also because I didn't want to print all 500 pages of the illegal PDF and then put them in a massive binder. Looks like I'll end up printing 100 pages anyway and going to gigs with two books instead of one. BOOH.

The Real Book - Rated
I bought my copy of the original in Times Square about 20 years ago. Up a staircase next to x-rated cinemas et al. Showed my union card, paid my money and then away. Illegal but it was wonderful and is still a treasured posession.

We have here a sanitized version. As a pianist the attraction of fake books is the outline of the substitute chords played by the likes of Bill Evans. These have gone. The approximation of the Bill Evans harmonisation of Here's that rainy day has disappeared along with so much else.

It is rather like the 3rd edition of Lionel Grigson's "A jazz chord book". The 2nd edition is a gold mine of alternate progressions. In the interests of computerisation Lionel cut a lot of these out before his untimely death and we are left with a shadow of the original.

This Real Book is sad and in no way compares with the original version. Regardless of the mistakes.

If you have nothing else then this is OK. Otherwise go for the Sher fake books; immaculate, accurate and comprehensive....even if expensive. Or contact Jazzwise and get a copy of Lionel's 3rd edition of his Chord Book. No melody lines but writing them down is good practice. If you can get a second hand copy of the second edition then go for it.

Finally! - Rated
Just recieved this book this morning...

I haven't got any of the 'original' real books - and after trying to get hold of them for a while, I just noticed this one. The publishers have obviously tried to make it as close to the original as possible - at first glance this 'sixth edition' looks almost identical to the illegal 'fifth' edition. The main difference of course being that all the tunes in this one are licensed. There are a few new songs in this one than i've seen in the original, and there are a few that seem to be missing, but the contents page is very nearly identical to the old version. The tunes in this one seem to be much easier to read than the fifth edition (the 'inkpen' type look is actually from a computer rather than the tunes being handwritten), and for the price (about a third of the illegal editions) its great! Two things i noticed about it that annoyed me though are that (1) the spiral-bound type spine is a bit more awkward than the originals; and (2) the pages are more fragile than the original real books.

The only other issue I can think of is the compatibility with the other real books; the structures of tunes are pretty much identical in this book (although some of them have the intros written in as well), but all the illegal realbook mistakes have been corrected, so that could cause problems.

On the back page it says 'also available, volumes 2 and 3, and all volumes in C, Bb, and Eb' but I havent seen them yet. When they get released I will definately be buying the other 2 volumes as well, and probably the Bb editions for my trumpet playing!