DISCUSSION OF FAKEBOOKS AND CANONICAL VERSIONS OF TUNES >Only in the last few decades has jazz been "codified." So much of it has >been passed from "ear-to-ear" and not written down that to try to study and >discuss jazz without listening to CD's or delving into the "blood-lines" >would be somewhat like reading a "how-to-tune-up-your-1957-Chevy-V8" book >having no idea what a carburetor is. > reed: Well you bring up several interesting points for discussion here. For a given tune, just what are the "real" chord changes and the standard key(s) for that matter. Well clearly there are the original sheet music changes. These are generally quite a bit different from what a jazz player would play but can be quite interesting in terms of understanding the true harmonic character of a tune. When you talk about the "real book" you have to clarify that a bit. The original "illegal" real books were great for when they first came out. At that time there was no source for what chord changes were being played on records unless you took it off the record yourself or if someone else told you what they are. The original real book had a lot of mistakes, that's true but for it's time was the best you could get by far! The "New Real Book" series by Chuck Sher music is another story altogher. The transcriptions were done by Bob Bauer whose musicianship is impeccable from the reputation he has. In other words I have no question that he correctly took the changes off for all those songs. So then the qustion for the editor, Bob Bauer in this case, is what to put in the fake book. What they did was to try and come to a "common practice" consenses as far as key and chord changes. (They explain this in the forward). That is essentially what appears in those books. If you look in the appendix you will see that he clearly states what sheet music (if any) and records were considered when arriving at those changes. Like you said one has to "be around" for a while to learn all the variations even for a very simple tune. This may mean getting lead sheets from different players, being on the bandstand, transcribing the changes yourself off the record, etc. This is the major complaint that pro's often have with people getting up on the bandstand with fakebooks. Clearly that is a stage that every one passes through but when you do that, you are often locking the band into one version of the chords and they may not want to play those changes. Alot of players like to vary the changes from chorus to chorus for variety. If you are staring at the music, you may not be openning your ears to what the rest of the musicians want to do. (Of course in the beginning (for a long time in fact), fixing on a particular set of changes is fairly necessary.) If you are a piano, guitar player and like playing ahead of the time, like on the and of 4 and and of 2, you are going to be constantly laying down the chords before the horn player has a chance to do what he wants to do. If you arent reading his mind (or know how he plays and where his lines go), you are going to be forcing him to play something he doesnt want to play or else to have a clash with what you're playing... sometimes that is okay. This is why some horn players like to record without chordal instruments or at least with players that are more sensitive to these issues. (To me this is like talking while someone else is talking or even worse interrupting them. I like to play chords in the spaces and often after I have heard what the horn player has to say. In fact singers will get mad if you don't do this alot of the time). Getting back to the "New Real Book", consider a tune like Autumn Leaves. To me the recording I always think of is the one from Cannonball Adderly's "Something Else" record (with Miles, Sam Jones, Hank Jones, Art Blakey). This one is not mentioned on the list of recordings considered however other Miles and Cannonball recrordings were. That recording has for example several deviations from the lead sheet in this book. However, there are lots of reharmonization possibilities that I use for this tune which don't appear at all in this book and which I don't think are particularly original on my part. I'm sure I've heard others play them before but probably in clubs because I don't have a particularly extensive set of recordings of this tune. I'd be happy to discuss my ideas on any particular tune, like autumn leaves for example, if you or anyone else is interested. Autumn leaves is one I always use with my beginning students because harmonically it is so simple in a way and so open to reharmonization possibilities.