Official New Home for Official Real Books
MILWAUKEE - August 18, 2016 - Hal Leonard, the world's largest producer of music performance and music educational publications, announced a new website dedicated to the world's most popular jazz songbooks: The Real Books.
OfficialRealBook.com launched this month to serve as a gathering space for musicians providing new release information, additional tools such as backing tracks and a song finder, and a forum to share ideas with other musicians.
The Real Book has a storied history beginning in the 1970s with students at Berklee wanting to raise the bar on fake books. A handful of students painstakingly transcribed popular jazz tunes of the day into handwritten charts. However over the years the books were photocopied without regard to copyright law. Royalties never got paid to the master songwriters behind the songs that the students so admired. In trying to preserve the jazz legacy, the students were inadvertently hurting it. In 2003, Hal Leonard began a quest to secure rights to nearly all of the songs in the original Real Book and in September 2004 they released the world's first legitimate versions of these treasured volumes. Staying true to the original "homemade" feel of the Real Book, these new licensed versions featured the same logo, cover design, and typefaces inside - they even created a font to match the book's "handwritten" look - with a nearly identical song list. Hal Leonard was able to release the licensed version of the Real Book at an even lower price than the originals sold for.
Today Hal Leonard has grown the brand to six full volumes of jazz gems along with a slew of new stylistic or artist-driven collections to cater to every style of gigging musician. In addition, professionally-recorded backing tracks are available for several of the volumes as are e-book versions of all the titles.
OfficialRealBook.com gathers all of these resources together so musicians can easily find them as well as links to individual digital downloads available on
SheetMusicDirect.us, another Hal Leonard website.
"We wanted to give musicians a one-stop shop for everything they need from the Real Book, whether they're looking for traditional paper books or a download for their iPad," said Jeff Schroedl, Executive Vice President at Hal Leonard and also a gigging musician. "We know there's an entire community of musicians that rely on the Real Books and have a wealth of jazz knowledge to share. We thought it could benefit future generations of jazz players if we had a gathering space for the older players to virtually hang out with the new kids and answer questions or offer advice."
The forums will also serve as research for future editions of Real Books with such topics as "What songs would you like to see in future Real Books?" and general topics about all different genres of jazz. Schroedl continued, "We'll be able to see what today's players are most passionate about and that will help guide us for future volumes of the Real Book, ensuring that we keep the legacy alive and kicking for a long time to come."