99% Invisible - 438- The Real Book

Episode Date: April 7, 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 known as jazz “standards”—all meticulously notated by hand. It’s called the Real Book. But if you were going to music school in the 1970s, you couldn’t just buy a copy of the Real Book at the campus bookstore. Because the Real Book... was illegal. The world’s most popular collection of Jazz music was a totally unlicensed publication. The full story of how the Real Book came to be this bootleg bible of jazz is a complicated one. It’s a story about what happens when an insurgent, improvisational art form like Jazz gets codified and becomes something that you can learn from a book. The Real Book

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Since the mid 1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book. It has a peach-colored cover, a chunky 70s style logo, and black plastic binding. It is delightfully homemade looking, like it was printed by a bunch of teenagers at KINGO's. And inside is the sheet music for hundreds of common jazz tunes, also known as jazz standards, all meticulously notated by hand. It's called The Real Book.

When I started playing jazz, I remember the first thing like a tar teacher said was, well, you gotta buy a real book. That's producer Mikael McAfinow. Everybody had one. It just felt like something you were expected to own if you were a serious musician. My high school jazz teacher, Mr. Leonard, had stacks of real books on his desk. And he told me that he actually got his first real book at the place where they were originally published,

Berkeley College of Music in Boston. He had just arrived for his freshman year. I heard people talking about the real book, the real book, it was just all around Berk. They were everywhere, everywhere. You were told when you had an ensemble, bring a real book we're gonna do with students out of that.

But pretty quickly Mr. Leonard discovered that the real book wasn't like the other books he needed to get for his classes. You couldn't just buy a copy in the campus bookstore. There was a guy who used to stand on the corner of Massive Near Boilsen Street and he had a box and he would sit there and he'd just, yeah, you want to put him on a real book, you want to buy a real book, that kind of thing.

From Mr. Leonard's description, this guy basically sounded like he wandered out of a ZZ top concert. You know, jeans really, really long, like mid-back level hair, big beard. And as I understood it, he used to get arrested about once every two weeks. He would get arrested because the real book was illegal. The world's most popular collection of jazz music was a totally unlicensed publication. A janky, self-published book created without permission

from music publishers or songwriters. It was duplicated at photocopy shops and sold on street corners, out of the trunks of cars, and under the table at music stores, where people used secret code words to make the exchange. The full story of how the Wiggle book came to be this bootleg bible of jazz is a complicated one.

It's a story about what happens when an insurgent improvisational art form like jazz gets codified and becomes something you can learn from a book. Barry Kernfeld is a musicologist who's written a lot about the history of jazz and music piracy. He's also a saxophonist, and at a coffee shop gig in the 1990s, he was opening his real book.

And I started wondering, well, we're reading all these tunes and learning to play and where did the book come from. Kernfeld says that long before the real book ever came out, jazz musicians were relying on collections of music they called fake books. And the story of the first fake book begins in the 1940s. Man named George Goodwin in New York City, involved heavily in radio in the early 1940s, was getting a little frustrated with all the intricacies of tracking licensing.

And so he invented this thing that he called the Tune Dex. The Tune Dex was an index card catalog design for radio station employees to keep track of the songs they were playing on air. On one side, the cards a few lines of bite-sized, cheap music, just the song's melody, lyrics, and chords, so that radio station employees could glance at it and quickly recall the song. But this abbreviated musical notation also made the cards useful to another group of people. And on the other side, they had a few lines of bite-sized, cheap music, just the song's melody, lyrics, and chords, so that radio station employees could glance at it and quickly recall the song. But this abbreviated musical notation also made the cards useful to another group of people,

working jazz musicians. As a black art form, jazz had developed out of a mix of other black music traditions, including spirituals in the blues. By the 40s, a lot of jazz was popular dance music, and many jazz musicians were making their money playing live gigs in small clubs and bars. The standard jazz repertoire was mostly well-known songs from Broadway, or New York songwriting factory, Tin Pan Alley, like the song Night and Day, by Tin Pan Alley legend, Cole Porter. Jazz musicians would riff and freestyle over these songs.

That's always been a key part of jazz, the art of improvisation. But what made the average gigging trumpeter or sax player truly valuable was their ability to play any one of hundreds of songs, right there on the spot. In the 1940s, people are working steadily as musicians, playing piano and nightclubs, or playing in a small group in nightclubs, fulfilling requests. You know, the cliche of the drunken guy at the egg, and you play, I love my art, and the San Francisco. To be prepared for any drunken request, musicians would bring stacks and stacks of sheet music to every gig. But lugging around a giant pile of paper was really cumbersome.

And that's where the tune decks came in. Someone figured out that you could gather a bunch of tune decks 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. They called them fake books because they helped musicians fake their way through unfamiliar songs. These first fake books were cheaper than regular sheet music and a lot more organized and they became an essential tool for this entire class of working musicians. And then they could bring that to gigs instead of having to draw through piles of sheet music and try to keep each individual sheet in alphabetical order what a nightmare.

You have your bound little book of 300 tunes or 500 tunes or a thousand tunes and that became the first popular music fake book. And that became the first popular music fake book. Musicians loved these new fake books, but the music publishers, not so much. They wanted musicians to buy their sheet music, and so the publishing companies started cracking down on fake book bootleggers. The music publishers did everything they could

FBI investigations and federal trials in order to suppress this new way of distributing music. But that didn't stop the bootleggers. And by the 1950s, there were countless illegal fake books in existence, which were being used in nightclubs all across the country. But as helpful as fake books were, they had a lot of problems. They were notoriously illegible and confusingly laid out.

It can't be stressed enough how deficient the old fake books were in this regard, how impossible to read and how stupidly misrepresented they were on the page. Steve Swallow is a jazz musician and an all-around good guy. A swell guy. I was like, you know, a thought of as a swell guy. I'm a bass player and I write tunes. That's the salient fact of my life. That's it.

Starting off as a young jazz musician in the 1950s, Swallow played it clubs and dances and weddings and bar mitzvahs. And for a lot of these gigs, he relied on these poorly designed fake books. Working on jazz music seriously, one of the first things I did was to buy a fake book, and so we're just vexing and badly, badly written. The other big problem with these fake books at this point was that the music inside felt

really out of date. The fake books hadn't changed since the mid-40s, but jazz had. Disillusioned by commercial jazz that appealed to mainstream white audiences, a new generation of black musicians took jazz improvisation to a new level, experimenting with more angular harmonies, technically demanding melodies, and blindingly fast tempos. Their new style was called Bebop. That was Bebop legend Charlie Parker, and Bebop was just the beginning, then came Hardbop and modal jazz spearheaded by Miles Davis.

Then you had the wild, dissonant, free jazz of people like Ornette Coleman. And the electrified jazz fusion of Herbie Hancock. By the 1970s, jazz had exploded into this constellation of different styles. Meanwhile, the economics of jazz had shifted too. There were fewer clubs and smaller paychecks. University jazz programs also started popping up around this time, providing steady teaching gigs to established musicians, and increasingly, the ivory tower became a place for young musicians to learn. And if you're going to jazz school, you need jazz books.

But the fake books at the time hadn't kept up with the music. They still contained the same old-fashioned collection of standards with the same old-fashioned collection of chord changes. So if a young jazz musician wanted to try and play like Charles Mingus or Sonny Rollins, they weren't going to learn from a book. That is, until two college kids invented the real book. I don't want to overemphasize my role in it, which was minor, but I knew the guys.

In the mid-70s, Steve Swallow began teaching at Boston's Berkeley College of Music, an elite private music school that boasted one of the first jazz performance programs in the country. Swallow had only been teaching at Berkeley for a few months when two students approached him about a secret project. I keep referring to them as the two guys who wrote the book because way back when they swore me to secrecy, they made me agree that I would not divulge their names." The two guys wanted to make a new fake book, one that actually catered to the needs of contemporary jazz musicians and reflected the current state of jazz, and they needed Steve's help. That's how they pitched it. They pitched it that they wanted to write a fake book that

would actually be useful to an 18-year-old person who wanted to become a jazz musician. As a longtime user of some pretty horrible fake books, Steve was excited. He thought that a modern, well-made jazz fake book would be an essential improvement for his students. And indeed, that was part of my initial response to their pitch. I thought, geez, it's why didn't I think of this?"

But he was also torn. He knew the students couldn't possibly pay licensing fees for all the songs they wanted to include. So he had to decide whether helping them was the right thing to do. Because clearly their intention was to break the law. They would also be selling a book filled with other people's music. But in the end, Swallow decided that the need for a good jazz fake book was so great that it was worth it, and he agreed to help. Swallow and the students were going to make a fake book that would actually be useful to a young person trying to play jazz. A real fake book.

A real book. From the very beginning, the students envisioned the Real Book as a cooler and more contemporary fake book than the staggy, outdated ones they'd grown up with, they wanted to include new songs from modern jazz musicians who were pushing the boundaries of the genre. They also wanted to include the old jazz standards from Broadway and Tin Pan Alley, but they wanted to update those classics with alternate chord changes that reflected the way that modern musicians like Miles Davis were actually playing them.

And Miles Davis was a central figure in all of this and he kind of exhumed dozens, I would say, of Tin Pan Alley tunes. And he and his sideman notably as pianist had smooth the harmonies in a way that became definitive. One of those standard tunes is someday my prince will come, a song from the 1937 Disney movie musical Snow White. Here's the original. And here's the Miles Davis version from 1961, the version that the students decided to put in the real book.

It's the same song, but listen to how different, how complex the chord sound when played by pianist Wynton Kelly. Modern jazz musicians had altered a lot of classic standards in this way over the years, and to capture these sophisticated alternate chord changes, the two students spent hours listening to recordings and transcribing what they heard, as best they could. It was a huge undertaking because most of these chord changes had never actually been written down. They weren't necessarily thinking about it like this at the time, but the students were effectively establishing a new set of standardized harmonies for a handful of classic songs.

But the music wasn't the only part of their new fake book that the two students wanted to improve. They also wanted to fix the aesthetic problems with the old fake books and make something that was nice to look at an easy to read. One of the two guys had a gorgeous music hand, the way he formed his quarter notes and his safe notes and all of that was lovely. And his role in the book among other things, he did all the actual penmanship. It's one guy who wrote the entire book.

He notated all of the music by hand in this very distinctive and expressive script. He also designed and silkscreened the logo on the front cover, just the words, the real book, written in chunky, schoolhouse rock style block letters. And holding everything together was a plastic binding that let the book easily lie flat on a music stand. By the summer of 1975, the book was done, and the students took it to local photocopying shops where they cranked out hundreds of copies to sell directly to other students and a few local businesses near Berkeley.

There was a corner store called the Bentley Smoker, which was not a music shop. It was just everybody smoked and and it was a cigarette store. And beneath the counter, it was a stack of real books. And almost overnight, everybody had to have one. Including my old jazz teacher, Mr. Leonard. He bought a copy of the real book from that guy with the long hair on Mass Ave. On Mass Ave, I think it was 20 bucks,

which was steep at that point. You know, it was like, wow, okay, but that's what you needed. It was like buying a school book, you know? In fact, I used it more than some of my textbooks for classrooms. Mainly, he used it with other students in late-night jam sessions in the practice rooms.

Anybody could go in and play, and of course, there were a lot of them because it was a big school. And if you walked in with your book, you couldn't participate and be a part of it. Mr. Leonard says the real book helped everyone get on the same page really quickly. And Steve Swallow notices too. Before the real book came out, he used to walk by the practice rooms and hear students mangling the chord changes to all of these jazz tunes.

And all of a sudden the real book came along and I was making this same walk and hearing the right changes to I love you and the right changes to my funny Valentine's. Whoa! This is remarkable. As the Reel Books No Daryl grew, so did the demand. The two students hadn't printed enough copies to keep up, but it turns out they didn't need to. Not long after they published, you know, a few hundred photocopied versions of this book, somebody else photocopied the book and started selling it. And copies of the copies were

fanning out to New York City in LA and then beyond to Berlin and Shanghai and so on. 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 that they'd originally cut out of the process as they watched unlicensed copies of their work get duplicated and sold. And of course they were in no position to yell about. They kind of had to just shake their heads. After they released the first edition of The Real Book, the students put out two more additions to correct mistakes, and then their work was done.

But The Real Book lived on, copied over and over again by new generations of bootleggers. Steve Swallow doesn't take the copyright issue lightly, but he thinks the real book was bootleggers. When he agreed to help the students, Swallow actually donated a bunch of his own songs. He figured it would benefit him in the long run, if more young people were exposed to his music. They might even record a cover someday, which would bring him royalties. And to be fair, the real book is actually how I learned who Steve Swallow was. I think to this day, my songs are played to the extent that they are chiefly because they

were available in the real book. It's been a blessing. And as the number of students and elite conservatory jazz programs continued to swell over the next few decades, the real book, with its modern repertoire, reharmonized standards, and beautiful handwriting, became the de facto textbook for this new legion of jazz students, the unofficial of visual handbook of jazz. Just like with old fake books, the success of the real book was a major problem for music publishers. Some companies released their own jazz songbooks, but they never managed to compete with the real book.

It couldn't compete with the real book because it just didn't have all the right songs in it. This is Jeff Schradel. He's an executive at Hall Leonard, a print music publishing company. You know, the real book was illegal so they didn't care about licensing and they just put all the best songs in and didn't pay anyone, which wasn't the right thing to do, but obviously from a competitive standpoint, they had the best book out of the gate. And the popularity of the real book meant that lots of people weren't getting paid for their work. That is, until Jeff Schradel

decided to make a legal version, the real real book. You know, I said, hey, we published jazz fake books and jazz lead sheets and jazz publications of all kinds. And you know, yet the real book is still the book. And, you know, why don't we just publish the real book legally? In the mid-2000s, Jeff Schradel and the publisher Hal Leonard secured the rights to almost every song in the real book and published a completely legal version. You don't need to buy the real book out of the back of someone's car anymore. It's available at your local music shop. And to me, the striking thing about this new version is the way that it looks. We didn't want to make the Hellenored corporate real book. We wanted to maintain that sort of homespawn underground look. We wanted the same card stock,

we wanted the same logo, we wanted the same binding." And they even wanted the same handwriting. Hall entered actually hired a copyist to mimic the old real book's iconic script and turn it into a digital font, which means a digital copy of a physical copy of one anonymous Berkeley students handwriting from the mid-70s will continue to live on for as long as new editions of the book are published. When Hell Leonard finally published the legal version of the real book in 2004, it was great news if you were a composer with a song in there. You'd finally be getting royalties from the sale of the most popular book of jazz music in the world.

But that didn't totally solve the intellectual property problems with the real book, and to understand why not, we're going to take a look at one of the songs inside. It's called Sophisticated Lady and it's on page 376 of the Hellennered Real Book. Sophisticated Lady was first recorded by the legendary pianist Duke Ellington and his band in 1933. A trombonist and Ellington's band named Lawrence Brown had this signature rift that he liked to play, and if you listen to the beginning of Sophisticated Lady, you'll hear it. It's the melody. Here's Laurence Brown talking with journalist Patricia Willard.

Who wrote sophisticated lady? Everybody jumps in and helps out, but to me, I had a theme that I played all the time, which is the first eight bars. That was the basic tune of sophisticated lady. But according to Brown, Ellington paid him $15 for his contribution to the song. And I got the terrific check for $15 for a flake, for right, it's specifically lady. Ah, now, have you ever gotten co-composed for credit? No, no, that chick can't sit you out. That means that Brown wasn't legally entitled to a songwriter credit or royalties, even though

he contributed one of the song's most recognizable elements. But Brown thought that sophisticated lady wouldn't even exist without his signature melody, and that Ellington took credit for writing a song that he merely arranged. I told him, I don't consider you a composer. You are a compiler to which his ego boiled over. Ironically, one person who did get co-writing credits on sophisticated lady was Duke Ellington's white manager, Irving Mills.

What exactly Mills contributed is debated, but it's clear that he used his power to get his name on many of Ellington's songs and reap more royalties for himself. To this day, when you open up the Howell-Entered Reelbook in turn to sophisticated lady, you'll see three listed writers, including Duke Ellington and Irving Mills.

But one name you won't see is Lawrence Brown. And so while the legalization of the real book did resolve most of its flagrant copyright violations, it didn't clear up authorship disputes like these that go back to the early days of jazz. And there are likely many more musicians just like write, even if those songs appear in the legal real book. Even if we put intellectual property questions aside for a second, the real book still has plenty of critics. The real book, the guys, when they did it, they transcribed things and they chose standard chords that some people were using,

but not everyone was using those same chords. Carolyn Wilkins teaches ensembles at Berkeley College of Music. And she says that the real book got so popular over the years that people started to treat the versions of the songs inside as definitive. But even though jazz has all these standards, Wilkins says they're not supposed to be played in one standard way. People, especially back in the day, considered putting their original stamp on something to be far more important than playing it, quote unquote, correctly. So they might change a chord here. They might change a note, they might

decide they like the key of D flat better than the key of D flat. This type of improvisation is much less common in classical music from the last two centuries where authenticity is more about how well you can reproduce what's on the page as precisely as possible. When people play Mozart's piano sonata number 16 and C major, they don't say, you know what, I'm gonna try it in A major this time. And so when musicians play a version of Bye-Bye Blackbird that sounds exactly as it appears in the real book, they're acting more like classical musicians than jazz musicians.

And once things kind of became standardized into the real book, then you have this thing of people who just always play the same thing the same way, same key, same set of chord changes. Nicholas Peyton is a musician and record label owner, and he compares the real book to a study guide or a cheat sheet, basically a way to distill this complicated art form into a manageable packet of digestible information. But see here becomes a problem when talking about codifying and teaching black music, is you can't teach free rhythmic thought. You can't put that in a book and expect students to grasp it. To Peyton, the music isn't just information to be learned from a book. It's a way of thinking and a form of expression, and it's fundamentally a black cultural phenomenon

that can't be taken out of its historical context. It's a communal music, at its essence, and it's a living, breathing organism. It can't be housed or archived in that way. Patent says that reading books like the real book, even going to music school, can only really get you so far. At some point, you're going to have to immerse yourself in the culture of the music. For Peyton and many other musicians, learning directly from elders in person is a crucial part of

what it means to really know the art form. I think for many people who perhaps don't live in a thriving music culture like a Detroit or New York or New Orleans or Chicago, if you live in Des Moines, Iowa, you know, school might be a good resource in two, but eventually at some point, if you're serious about playing this music, you're going to have to be around people who actually do it. But Carolyn Wilkins says that the real book does have its place in jazz education. Over her years at Berkeley, she's seen how it can be a useful starting place, a tool to bring young jazz musicians together. A traditional real book gives you at least some sense of this is the repertoire. These are the tunes. If you want to walk into a jam session anywhere in the world and unpack your instrument and say,

can I sit in? These are the tunes that you're going to need. And if you say, all right, we're going to play beautiful love. Boom, now everyone has a real book that, there's beautiful love, D minor, duh, we're ready. But she also says, if you only play songs as they're notated in the real book, and that's as far as you take it, you're not really playing the music the way it's supposed to be played.

To do that, you have to go further. Then you go out and listen to 20 different people play it and find different ways, and then ultimately, you must find your own way. After the break, McKellen, I talk about the central mystery of the real book. Who were the two Berkeley students who compiled the first version and sold it around Boston? We go down that rabbit hole after this. you Okay, so we're back with Macal Macavena who reported that story. And Macal, as I understand it, there is a central mystery at the heart of the story. And that's who wrote the real book, the first real book.

The identities of the authors have remained anonymous after all these years, but you were determined to try to figure this out. So why did you want to know the identity of the authors? So the real book was just this kind of omnipresent thing when I was, you know, learning jazz in high school. And it didn't even really seem like it had authors to begin with, just like this book that everybody had. And, you know, it just popped out of thin air. And so when

I learned that there was this backstory and there were these people kind of mysterious figures behind the real book, I was just like, I have to know. Part of it too, for me, was really just, you know, the real book had a big impact on my approach to learning jazz in high school, and the guys who put it together, the choices that they made, kind of directed what I was doing, the kind of like this invisible hand, you know, guiding my musical development, and so to kind of try and reach out and find those guys felt weirdly meaningful to me, in a way. That makes sense to me. So, okay, so where did you start?

So, I started by talking to my high school jazz teacher, Mr. Leonard, who was a student at Berkeley in the late 70s, a couple of years after the real book came out. But he told me that, you know, when he was a student there, no one was really interested in the story behind the real book or where it came from. No, at that point, we were just concerned with trying not to get busted, buying it from the guy in the corner. I don't even remember being much of a topic of discussion.

Okay, so Mr. Leonard is a bust, so where did you turn to next? So next, I talked to Steve Swallow. Steve Swallow was pretty intimately involved in the creation of the book. And obviously he knew who these guys were, but he wasn't about to tell me because they had sworn him to a note of secrecy after they finished and put it out. But still, I asked him, do you have their contact information?

Would you be able to reach out on my behalf if you do? And he said, yeah, I think I was in touch with one of them via email maybe like 10 years ago. We've had email contact maybe Jesus. Maybe 10 years ago, but I would try. I would send an email to that address. And if it still works, see what he says. Sure. Okay, here we go. All right. And so he did and it came back, you know, returned to sender, just bounced back immediately. So that was also a dead end. Okay. Yeah, at this point, I'm feeling a little bit frustrated, a little bit stuck, not really

sure what to do next. And then, you know, I just start reading everything I can online that anyone is written about the real book. And one day, I'm on this random blog post somewhere on the internet and I scroll down to the comments section and one of the first comments is from a guy who's claiming to be one of the original authors He's saying, you know, I was one of the authors of the real book and he only goes by one letter So no real name he leaves just a letter to sign off on this comment and the letter is B. Mm-hmm. So mysterious.

Very mysterious. This B guy, he also says he was in touch with Barry Kernfeld, who is a musicologist who I had actually already interviewed for this piece. Okay, okay. So how do you know that the person who wrote this comment was the person who actually wrote the real book and not just somebody claiming to be, because I could go on a message word and say, I wrote the real book too, you know. Yeah, totally. So I actually reached out to Barry Kernfeld again after I'd interviewed him and I asked, is this legit?

Did you get an email from this guy where you in contact with him? This guy who said he was in contact with you who claims to do it for it in the real book? And Barry said, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. He said, actually about 10 years ago, he got an email from this guy and you know, that they were in contact and he said,

he actually still had that email. And so I had to ask him, obviously, can you get back in touch? Can you email this guy again? And he said, sure, I'll try. It's been a long time, but I'll give it a shot. So Barry reached out to the sky. Couple days later, he tells me to reach out directly.

Okay, here we go. I reach out and then a couple days later, I hear back. And it's a message from a ultra encrypted email server based somewhere outside of the United States. And it's someone using an obviously fake name, but it is definitely this guy. It is B. So this is the guy.

I mean, this is the guy. I mean, when you're going through this, is this level of subterfuge? Does it feel necessary or theatrical, or how is it striking you at this point? It feels a little bit over the top. I do feel like I'm corresponding with a double agent deep in the cold war somewhere. But it's also a little bit exciting.

It's not a huge mystery, but it is mysterious, definitely. So what did this email say? So I asked him if you would want to do an audio interview and predictably, he said, no, then I asked him, you know, do you want to answer a couple questions over email? And he said, sure. And so I sent him an email with a list of questions and waited a couple days, heard nothing back, sent a follow up email, waited a couple more days, heard nothing back, sent another follow-up email, and then this continued for five times, and at this point, I just kind of resigned myself to the

fact that I was not going to hear back from him. Yeah, that's too bad. And I just started pursuing different avenues to try and find this guy or one of the guys. I asked my high school jazz teacher again, do you know people from Berkeley, do you know some names? Can you put me in touch with them? And, you know, he got in touch with a teacher of his who passed on some names to me and I started emailing people, not getting, you know, any more responses. I felt like I was kind of circling the drain at this point. And were you pretty resolved at this point that you were never going to hear from this person or find them before we put the story out. Yeah, I was like, we're never gonna hear back. I was so close and we lost the thread.

It's not coming back. So where are we now? Well, four days before this episode was set to air, I opened my email, it's about 10 p.m. I'm ready to go to sleep. And it's an email from B. Yes. With answers to all of our questions. Oh, nice. So what did they have to say for themselves?

Like, what kind of questions did you ask? So we asked kind of the gamut, really, of everything related to, you know, from handwriting, you know, was it his handwriting? How do you feel about that handwriting being, you know, from handwriting, you know, was it his handwriting? How do you feel about that handwriting being, you know, omnipresent in real books throughout the world to like, how did it feel to create this thing that some people have, you know, major beefs or major problems with in terms of how it's affected jazz. Yeah. And he had answers to all of those questions.

So was it his handwriting? It was. He says, yes, the handwriting is mine, although it looks amateurish to me now, but it's quite a hoot to see it everywhere. Someone created a real book font based on my hand. It's close, but no cigar. Wow.

Throw it throwing a little bit of shade at how Leonard there. You know, did they have a sense of the phenomenon that it was going to become when they were making it? Definitely not. So on that note, he says, we had no idea in our wildest dreams that would become the phenomenon that it is. Countless times, we've personally seen the real book used in bars, clubs, schools, and

wedding receptions. It's everywhere. In 2018, I visited a friend of a cousin who had a home recording studio and there were six real books scattered around the room. And if he's keeping up this level of secrecy, you can't just point to him and say, hey, I did that. Yeah, it was a really tough temptation. If I'm like, if I see my book that the Kurt and I did for nine percent of us will out in the world, you bet. I'm going to say, well, hey, I'm that guy. So he said to do that for like 40 years and never seen me.

You know, I guess, you know, some of the bigger issues with the real book that we talk about, you know, the kind of, you know, the copyright and the codification of a style. Did he have any sort of insight into that kind of thing? Yeah. It's really interesting what he said about that. So, and now I'm quoting directly from what he wrote to me. The real book truly changed the world in many good ways, but also not so good. The intent was to create a tool for learning tunes, but not something to be used on the bandstand. It's proliferation into clubs created a negative effect, seemingly dictating

what and how to play. Wow, well, that's, we really hit the nail on my head. And actually even more on that, he says, never was there any intent to codify anything. The book was meant to help people learn tunes, and beyond what is in the book, it's the responsibility of the musician to listen to as many versions as possible to form one's own sense of how to play the tune. That's why we listed some different recording sources at the bottom of tunes. Every recording has its own tempo and key melodic interpretation form and reharmonizations and therein lie many opportunities to create your own version.

Wow, that is so interesting. Because he basically agrees with most of the critiques of the real book that people had when you talk to them. Yeah, he's essentially saying almost the exact same thing that Carolyn Wilkins said, the Berkeley professor that we talked to towards the end of the piece, basically almost even word for word. It's kind of amazing. And what's also striking is that he basically says the same thing that Nicholas Payton, who is the musician that we talked to, also said about the real book. You know, if you remember, Nicholas Payton was saying that you can't really learn jazz from a book at all. And B, in his answer, says, I think books are fine for theory and learning tunes, but no

amount of book reading will substitute for the actual act of playing music. Feel, timing, groove, and improvisation need to be learned by doing. It's kind of amazing that like he is saying basically the exact same thing that we heard from Nicholas Payton here. Yeah, that's really remarkable. What about this need for anonymity? Like is this something that I mean, obviously at this point, if people knew about it, he's

not going to prosecute for anything really realistically at this point, if people know about it, he's not gonna prosecute for anything really, realistically at this point. So what is that all about? Yeah, you know, it kind of seems like he likes the mystery, and he likes keeping up the mystery. I'm gonna quote again from what he wrote, the internet is full of articles and YouTube videos about the real book, and chat rooms all over the web

are rife with discussions about its origins, with zillions of different opinions. That's what's fun about it. Keep the mystery alive. Why mess with an urban legend? You know, I like this guy. Pfft. Pfft.

I couldn't agree more. Pfft. Let's not mess with it. Let him have his anonymity. I don't think we'll mess with it. Sounds good. Well, thank you, MacKell. I don't think we'll mess with it. Sounds good. Well, thank you, Macal. This was so much fun.

Thanks, Roman. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 29% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Michele McCavinaw, edited by Emmett Fitzgerald, music by our director of Sound Sean Rial, mixed by Amidik Anatra. Delaney Hall is a senior producer, Kurt Coltsett is the digital director, the rest of the team is Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Joe Rosenberg, Lashemba Dawn, Katie Mingle, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to author and professor Gerald Hor who we also interviewed for this story. You can check out Nicholas Payton's music at NicholasPayton.com and follow him on Instagram at NicholasPayton.

If you want to read more about the history of fake books, check out Barry Kernfeld's books, pop song, piracy, and the story of fake books. We are a project of 91.7K ALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, which is scattered across the North American continent right now, but will always be centered in beautiful downtown, Oakland, California. We are a founding member of Radio Topia from PRX,

a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative 100% artist-owned podcasts in the world, fun and all, at radiotopia.fm. You can tweet me at Roman Mars on the show at 9 on PIorgh, or on Instagram and Reddit too. I am sure there is an entire Reddit thread already devoted to trying to figure out who made the first real book. Don't do it, guys. It doesn't really matter. And mysteries are fun. Instead, spend that energy going through

the archive and sharing your favorite episode with a friend at 9-9-PI.org. Radio Topeo.