Most working musicians know these books inside out, they cover a good amount of the standard jazz repertoire and have been in use since the 70's. Often described as the 'Jazz Musicians's Bible'. So any way i've been using the 5th edition for years and finally decided to buy the complete collection of the new legal 6th editions published by the Hal Leonard Corp now that they are all available, namely The Real Book vol 1-3 for C,Bb,Eb and Bass Clef. They are quite reasonably priced on Amazon and very accessible for gigs/rehearsals.

Any way vol 2 turned up yesterday, I'm assuming they are not going to turn up in any particular order...just when they land. I've got some comments i'd like to share and maybe one or two others have opinions too about these new 6th edition incarnations of the Real Book.

Some tunes are missing, some chords have been changed, some of the tunes have incorrect notes (how on earth do you do that?), they've removed some of the rather cool double stops which i thought sounded really cool.

On the plus side at least the musicians who wrote the tunes are now getting paid, the type set remains faithful to the original which is very easy to read and their are no page turns. They've added some cool new tunes.

I may have more comments when the other volumes arrive but this is my initial impression.


Any one else been using these great books and what do you think of the new legalised 6th edition?

I can't say I've has any experience playing from the illegal versions of the Real Book. I do know that for as long as I've been playing jazz Real Book charts have been notorious for having "wrong" notes/chords. I'm not sure they're always wrong, just different. For many of the standards there's more than one way they're played.

Yes i'd have to agree with that, however i do feel that the 'AB Real Book' published by our venerable ABRSM has been particularly well put together. I have'nt noticed anything in them (so far) that i would say was incorrect. The ABRSM have put a lot of effort into this book however i do feel they could have stretched them selves a bit more and had a greater number of standards. Their is only about 100 tunes in their edition compared to about 400 in each volume of the original Real books.

I have very little experience of real books, but I'd have to agree that the AB one is rather good from what I can tell. I'm hoping that maybe they will expand in future by bringing out companion volumes with more tunes in them which would be fab.

One for alto clef would be nice ...

Ooooh yeah!

Though I think the treble clef one goes pretty low - certain;y too low for the flute in a couple of places (requiring one to go up the octave)

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Though I think the treble clef one goes pretty low - certain;y too low for the flute in a couple of places (requiring one to go up the octave)
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This is one of my gripes with the old 5th edition, some of the bass clef parts were written a whole octave below my actual range. It will be interesting to see if the Hal Leonard Corp have addressed this issue. I'm still awaiting my bass clef editions. (Ordered all 3 volumes)