Fake book
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A fake book is a collection of musical lead sheets intended to help a performer quickly learn new songs. Each song in a fake book contains the melody line, basic chords, and lyrics - the minimal information needed by a musician to make an impromptu arrangement of a song, or "fake it."
The fake book is a central part of the culture of playing music in public, particularly in jazz, where improvisation is particularly valued.
Fake books are not intended for novices: the reader must follow and interpret the scant notation. However, fake books can be an avenue to playing songs quickly; a few chords and a one-note melody line can allow an amateur to play a passable version of any song with relative ease.
Despite the name, fake books are often unbound, consisting of a thick, loose stack of sheets.
[edit] History
The origins of transcriptions were often murky and not always of the best musical quality. But the sheer amount of the tunes more than compensated for this drawback, especially since skilled musicians could always improve the sound.
For many years the "standard" fake books were called simply "The Fake Books." All were composed of songs illegally printed, with no royalties being paid to the copyright owners.
The first two volumes, Fake Book Volume 1 and Fake Book Volume 2, issued in the late 1940s–1950s, together comprised about 2,000 songs dating from the turn of the 20th century through the late 1950s. In the 1950s the Modern Jazz Fake Book, Volumes 1 and 2 was issued, and Fake Book Volume 3, containing about 500 songs, came out in 1961.
The music in Fake Books 1, 2, and 3 was photocopied or reset with a musical typewriter from the melody lines of the original sheet music. Usually chord symbols, titles, composer names, and lyrics were typewritten, but for a number of songs these were all photocopied along with the melody line.
The chord changes in these books were notoriously inaccurate. Most of them were based on the guitar and ukelele chords commonly found in earlier sheet music, which often did not include the roots of the harmony. For example, a chord labeled "Fdim" ("F diminished") for guitar or ukelele might functionally be a G7b9 ("G seven, flat nine") chord, which has a G as the root plus all the notes of an Fdim7 chord. Thus, successfully using the Fake Books required the expertise of jazz musicians and others trained in functional harmony in order to reinterpret the chord symbols.
The three Fake Books were well indexed, alphabetically as well as by musical genre and Broadway show. Interestingly, although the tunes in the Fake Books were compiled illegally, the creators printed copyright information under every song — perhaps to give the false impression that the Fake Books were legal.
The Modern Jazz Fake Book was divided into two sections, each indexed separately as Volume One and Volume Two. The music was transcribed by hand from recordings, and each transcription included performer name, record label, and catalog number. Unlike today's fake and "real" books that have "jazz' in their titles, the Modern Jazz Fake Book included no standards, but only original tunes written and recorded by jazz musicians.
All these books have been long out of print, but the Modern Jazz Fake Book has shown up under the name Library of Modern Jazz in collections of sheet music scanned and digitized on CDs and DVDs.
At some point, there came The Real Book, which claimed to fix all problems of poor design, although it was riddled with errors which were gradually corrected by generations of players. It was extremely popular and in its turn spawned a number of "fake Real Books".
Fake books originally infringed copyrights, and their circulation was primarily underground. The 6th edition of the 'Real Book' is legally published, unlike previous versions, and remains a standard resource for professional musicians.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Fake Book Index - Searchable listing of songs from popular fake books.
- Jazz Chord Charts - Free jazz chord charts.
- Fake Book Directory - Search commercially available fake books by song title, artist, keyword
