Archives (2020), Episode 91: Real Book Obscurities

You go to a jazz jam session with students or amateurs. One of the most common musical guides that almost every player uses is The Real Book, 6th Edition, Volume 1.

The original Real Book was put together in the mid 1970’s by some Berklee College of Music music students in Boston, partly as a way to make some money and probably also so they could have some standard melodies and chords to use during jazz jams. No royalties were paid.

In 2004, Hal Leonard obtained the rights to most of the tunes in the real book. He deleted some, added others, and that’s how the Real Book 6th Edition came into being.

I’ve gone through that Real Book a few times. Here are a few tunes that are relatively obscure. Some of them I’ve selected because I really like. Others are just curiosities.

I’ll play a commercially recorded version of 9 of them. They are: Equipoise, Las Vegas Tango, Chelsea Bridge, Como En Vietnam, Yes and No, Blue Room, Unity Village, Django, and Duke Ellington’s beautiful “African Flower”.