The Real Book Project Announcement
It’s so important to actively listen to music if you want to be a musician. There is so much that you learn right away just by doing nothing else but listening to a piece of music, especially if you are following along with a score or sheet music. As a classical-trained percussionist, I was told often to do this in preparation for rehearsals and performances. It’s not unlike watching or listening to a recording of a play if you’re getting ready to act in a play: you learn your part, you notice other parts, and you understand how the work is organized. In classical music, recordings are very important, especially who recorded it. If, for instance, I was studying symphonies by romantic era composers, I would be paying attention to which conductor and which orchestra the recording was by. I may be on the look out for recordings of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra conducted by George Szell or Lorin Maazel, the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa, or the New York Philharmonic by Leonard Bernstein.
In the past few years I have been teaching more and more drum set and jazz. Arguably, it is more important to know songs and repertoire for jazz than classical music. With jazz comes the expectation of a wide knowledge of songs that are often memorized so that the improvisation is more genuine. So, if you are a mostly classical musician or a beginning jazz musician, where should you begin to study the jazz repertoire? My recommendation is to start with a Fake Book, or in this case, the sixth edition of The Real Book. A Fake Book is a term that was used in the past for the collection of sheet music songs that a band or musician had acquired (usually illegally). Currently, The Real Book contains a select collection of jazz genre songs. The complication with any Real Book publication is that what you see in the music may not be what you hear on the recording. Part of this may be the artist’s interpretation and the other is the Real Book’s tendency to have errors or different versions.
This brings me to The Real Book Project. The Real Book Project is a list of recordings of songs in the sixth edition of The Real Book that are most similar to what is printed in the book. Some versions that are listed may be more accurate than others … this is just how the world of recorded music vs. printed music works sometimes. I hope you find these lists helpful as I publish them over the next several weeks. Happy Listening!
If you have any comments or questions, feel free to contact me at fraley.percussion@gmail.com.
