How did they learn tunes, way back when?

[rpjazzguitar]

When I was coming up in the mid 60's I don't recall seeing charts on gigs, not that I saw all that many gigs when I was a minor in NYC.

There was an unspoken list of standards that players knew.

I still wonder how new players learned them.

Obviously, you can say they lifted them from records. But, at the time, records were expensive (something like two hours of minimum wage for an LP) and there was no Internet. So, the situation might be that a guy went to a jam or gig and a tune he didn't know got called. So, he resolved to learn the tune. How would he have done that? Buying a record for each of dozens of tunes was probably beyond the budget of a budding jazz musician.

There was the old Cardex fakebook. I'm guessing that was a common source.

Another possibility was that you heard it on the bandstand - while you were laying out - and you remembered it. Warren Nunes told me that if he heard a tune once on a bar's jukebox, he knew if for the rest of his life.

There were radio stations that played standards (and, in NYC, 2 jazz stations, one FM and one AM). So you could spend your afternoons listening to the radio and figuring out the tunes. I know a bassist who, while unemployed for an extended period did that daily for pop music. He learned a vast number of tunes and ended up in Vegas. Probably good for your repertoire and good for your ear.

Another thing that may have helped is playing tunes in whatever key the leader/singer happened to call. I've been doing some of that lately, in a limited way, and even that much has been helpful in building my ear, or so I think. This is, in my slow-learner case, having a chart in one key, but playing the tune in several others. I've never seen it recommended, but I think it might be useful as a step towards playing any tune in any key -- the way some players I admire can do.

All in all, my guess is that the players with good enough ears to learn and remember the tunes, and play them in any key, got the gigs and the others didn't. I recall a couple of gigs where the pianist/leader had a handwritten book, the bassist crowded around the piano to read over his shoulder while everybody else sank or swam. And, there was no advance warning of what was going to be called.

Nowadays, around here, I rarely see that kind of standards gig. Usually, I do see charts, except for heavily rehearsed bands. I even see players, who I know have massive ears, still reading, because the band is playing arrangements without much, if any, rehearsal. And, when I've been called for a standards gig, there have been charts, presumably because the leader doesn't want to take any changes. And, I've seen long term pros open the book to Autumn Leaves - I don't know why except that it reduces one potential source of error.

With the Internet, you can check out as many versions of a tune as you want. If you're persistent enough, you can learn multiple versions and, hopefully, have good enough ears to tell which one, if any, you're supposed to be playing on a gig.

But I still wonder, how would today's players have fared in that earlier time?

[Mick-7]

I think they just had to remember the tunes chord changes, people had various mneumonic systems for that. They'd remember the melodies by ear, and knew how they related to the chord changes, or the melody would bring the harmony to mind.

[rpjazzguitar]

I think they just had to remember the tunes chord changes, people had various mneumonic systems for that. They'd remember the melodies by ear, and knew how they related to the chord changes, or the melody would bring the harmony to mind.

Remember the melodies from the bandstand? The radio?

A good player with a good ear can hear (and play) the harmony if he can remember the melody and the general sound of the tune.

Same as any fan of the Beatles will know if you play the wrong chord. That just needs to be advanced to knowing the right chord.

[Mick-7]

Remember the melodies from the bandstand? The radio?

They were usually popular tunes so could be heard on the radio, on records, etc. And they usually had similar, predictable, chord changes. Joe Pass said he had learned most songs by ear, from the radio.

[mr. beaumont]

recordings, radio if you didn't have the actual item, handwritten sheets, the card catalog thing (my jazz mentor had one of these! And y'all thought the Real Book had mistakes) and a whole lot of sitting in, looking for similarities to tunes you do know, and "faking it til you make it."

[AllanAllen]

Obviously, you can say they lifted them from records. But, at the time, records were expensive (something like two hours of minimum wage for an LP)

45s were cheap. They were trying to sell them to teenagers after all. LPs were for adults.

Edit: Removed 78s because they were out of fashion in the time period we are talking about.

[Christian Miller]

People got good ears because the charts weren’t reliable. So there was a requirement for musicians to be in dialogue with any sheet music or lead sheets they did come across.

The Real Book was considered especially good when it came out. Which is funny in retrospect because it’s famously full of mistakes and superseded by more accurate books such as the Sher New Real Book. But it speaks to how sketchy the Fake books must have been.

As to how they developed this power, yes it is possible to learn it - but not from a jazz course. If you get into the standards thing you can learn tunes very quickly. You didn’t just learn them from a record player, you learned them listening to people on gigs play them, they had those tunes on jukeboxes, movies etc etc

FWIW I can learn changes quickly by ear because I’ve learned a lot of tunes over the years. In fact I’d rather learn them that way.

It’s a language with relatively few words, so it’s not exactly a flex. It’s not like taking down big band arrangements by ear at speed - I know people who can do that btw. It’s in the realm of humans.

For that reason it is a skill more people should apprentice themselves to and apps like iReal Pro offer a temptation not to do it.

I would say it’s harder now than then.

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[rpjazzguitar]

45s were cheap. They were trying to sell them to teenagers after all. LPs were for adults.

Edit: Removed 78s because they were out of fashion in the time period we are talking about.

I didn't remember them as so cheap. They were about a dollar when minimum wage was $1.25. And LPs were about $5. These are manufacturer's retail prices. I couldn't find street prices. My memory is maybe 20% less.

So, a single cost the better part of an hour worth of take home pay and a stereo LP cost 4 times that, or so. Not cheap.

And, if you had the money, you still had to find a store that had records with the tunes you wanted to learn. Current hits, easy, but older tunes were probably hard to find.

[rpjazzguitar]

People got good ears because the charts weren’t reliable. So there was a requirement for musicians to be in dialogue with any sheet music or lead sheets they did come across.
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You reminded me that music stores had racks of sheet music. The Beatles' Help cost 75 cents, according to the price printed on the title page. Easier to find a popular tune than an old standard, of course.

Of course, this was before photocopying was widely available. Not sure about poloroid instant cameras, but I never heard of anybody photographing anything the way people do with their phones now.

The bands I played in back then were playing the rock music of the time. I recall one week long gig where the band played perhaps 20 tunes and I had to learn each one by ear and by watching the other guitarist's hands. I remember a NYE gig where the rock band was pressed into service for older music and everybody had the old cardex fakebook -- and we just read tunes.

I spent a lot of time, I mean, a lot of time, reading through the cardex fakebook's first 200 pages. I probably read the first 600 tunes, with lyrics. The remainder of the book contained "Latin" tunes I'd never heard, with a few exceptions, like Tico Tico and Miami Beach Rhumba. As I read them, I recognized some from the car radio tuned to channels my parents picked. One program I recall was Make Believe Ballroom, which played old standards. I learned the melodies, more or less, to a lot of tunes that way, but I found it much harder to get the chords.

[Strat-itis]

Monk saying he taught Charlie Parker the chords to some of his songs at 1:10.

[Christian Miller]

Monks music is hard and almost no one played it the way Monk did. It’s a different kettle of fish from GASB repertoire.

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[Ukena]

I remember a story about Fats Waller going to a recording date with his Rhythm sidekicks in a taxi, and talking over the tunes they were going to play. Then, of course, so many of those recordings in the '30's and '40's were done in one take.

I was born in 1949. I learned songs by ear – by the time I graduated from high school, I could play the melodies and chords to dozens of popular songs. There was also a lot of sheet music available – many, many of my friends had pianos in their houses, with sheet music all over the place. Sheet music was relatively inexpensive. Until the end of the 1920's, pianos were like stereos in the '70's – it's how families listened to music. On West 14th St. in NYC there was a whole block of piano manufacturers, memorialized by a plaque in Union Square. By 1919, there were 60 piano factories in the Bronx. If your house didn't have a piano, chances were great that your neighbor or your aunt down the street had one.

A lot of the record stores also had racks of sheet music, and one could always check up on chord changes through a quick look through the racks.

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

I started playing in 1955 and gigging in 1959. We had 4 basic ways to learn tunes: find the sheet music, get the record, learn it from broadcast media, or hear it live. These all reinforced each other because each exposure to a tune was additive. My friends and I listened endlessly to the records we had, using available music to clarify the difficult or hard to transcribe parts. There were so many variety shows on TV with live bands and musical acts that I heard several tunes a week I needed to learn - and each time I heard a tune, it was a little more firmly embedded in my brain. There was also a lot of music on radio (AM, FM, and shortwave - even the Voice of America carried great jazz programming in the 1950s and '60s), often with knowledgeable commentary to help us learn. The great jazz DJs really got into the weeds on both music and performance with commentary that often rivaled or exceeded the detail of liner notes. Ed Beech, Sid Torin, Oscar Treadwell, Al Collins and others like them offered new insight into the jazz they played. I used to stay up late at night to listen to shows from New York and Chicago on my father's shortwave radio.

I was a kid, so I couldn't hang out in clubs. But there were many public performances by great jazz artists in concert halls around the country. My bandmates and I were able to hear and watch Stan Kenton, Sal Salvador, Clyde McCoy, Harry James etc at concert venues like the ballroom at Steel Pier in Atlantic CIty.. We were sponges - we learned the basics of many many tunes after hearing them half a dozen times, and we could peek at sheet music in stores to get structure and details.

The original "fake book" system was a series of index cards called the Tune-Dex. It was a legal subscription service created in 1942 by a radio station programming director named George Goodwin, and each card caried a lead sheet on one side and a lot of information about the tune on the other. It grew to about 25,000 tunes / cards before shutting down in 1963. The illegal copying, sale, and distribution of these cards was the beginning of the fake book industry. In 1959, I got my first fake book (the open loose leaf book below) and the world changed. They were illegal, so the music store owner sold it to me after he closed for the day (for $10 IIRC) and I carried it home in my empty guitar case. I acquired 4 volumes over the next 2 years.

Say what you will about the weaknesses of fake books, they enabled thousands of musicians to expand their repertoires, succeed in tough competitive situations, and please a lot of people (both leaders and listeners). Within 6 months of getting my first one, I & my band mates could play a few hundred standards. The first ones were bebop and popular jazz standards, with fake books for rock, blues, Broadway, movies etc coming later in the '60s. Most of the tunes in them had significant errors, but we recognized many and fixed what we could. With one or two listens to a recording of a new tune plus a fake book to keep us on the rails, it was a new world.



I had a quartet when I started high school - piano, upright bass, drums, and me. The pianist was in and out, and we added a tenor the next year. We played all the pop tunes of the day to get dances and party gigs, and we knew enough standards to have steady work playing parties for our parents' social groups. That led to gigs at local hotels and restaurants, and what kept us going was having learned hundreds of tunes over the first year we were together. By the time I was 16, I was playing in a few local clubs. One of the best jazz gigs I had in high school was at a strip club. We played whatever we wanted - it just had to have a beat.

FWIW, most 33 RPM albums cost $3.98 in the late '50s and ealy '60s, with stereo costing $1 more. But there were discounts on unpopular stock, and we didn't care who recorded the tunes if we just needed to learn them. Albums had 12 tracks, and at least 2 or 3 were tunes we could use on a gig. Old stock was also discounted, and this included a lot of potboilers by known but no longer hot stars. So we could get 2 or 3 usable albums every week or two for $5 or less and learn at least 3 or 4 new tunes. We made about $15 each for a typical 2 hour party gig in 1960. Once we started playing community center and hotel gigs (which were mostly dances for teenagers), we made even more and could acquire a steady stream of records and music to learn. By the time I was a junior in high school. I knew more tunes than most of the local semipros in the adult bands in our area. This got me gigs with far better musicians than I was, just because I could play so many tunes and hold my own with them.

45s were not only for kids. There were many 45 RPM "EP albums", which were small boxed sets (usually 5 discs). There were broadway and film soundtracks, popular singers like Mario Lanza and Perry Como, big band compilations from mainstreamers like Artie Shaw, etc. I have several that belonged to my parents. There was a huge market for self contained 45RPM record players with changers - so you could stack several and get at least as much listening time before having to get up and turn them over as you got from one side of an LP.



(Perry Como's guitar player was Tony Mottola!)



Once we could carry recorded music with us, learning was just a matter of repetitive listening wherever we were. No one bothered with sheet music unless you needed it for difficult tunes or those for which no recording was available. We learned most new tunes in the car from constantly played cassette tapes. But the gold standard for learning jazz was always the original recordings. We had (and still have) a great local FM jazz station, so I could hear a lot of jazz on the radio, too.

But, as Ukena says, we learned mostly by ear. Our elders corrected us as needed, even though they didn't always agree on the "right" notes / changes / rhythms either. And now that we're the elders, the shoe's on the other foot - we're the disagreeable ones

[rpjazzguitar]

Never, thanks for all that info.

Tunedex. I must have misremembered that as Cardex. That's the fakebook though - I recognize the page. Got it in 64. My first gig was playing tunes out of that book.

It was a few years before I saw a different fake book. Then it was something like "Hits of the 70s" or similar.

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

That's the fakebook though - I recognize the page.

You can see that each page in that book is a facsimile of Tune-Dex cards lined up top to bottom. You can even see the copyright info printed underneath each tune. Goodwin had appaently convinced music publishers that it was good for their business to let him reproduce these - I don't think he ever paid royalties for his reproductions. As the Tune-Dex catalog expanded to 25,000 cards, it's not at all surprising that someone started copying these into a book form with mutiple tunes on each page. I suspect Goodwin might have adopted this and prospered, but he died 2 years after Tune-Dex went out of business.

What's even more interesting to me is that these were sold to radio stations as well as to working musicians, as a way to keep up with trends in music and maintain a current music library. It was a subscription service, so new cards were sent to subscribers as new tunes wre published (keeping all in the business updated on the latest songs). I don't know who actually made those cards - it's hard to believe that Goodwin actually prepared 25k cards on his own. But it seems highly likely that many of the errors in the fake books derived from Tune-Dex were directly copied from the original cards and were mistakes in transcription for Tune-Dex.

Here's the front of an original Tune-Dex card -



and here's the back -

That's the fakebook though - I recognize the page. Got it in 64. My first gig was playing tunes out of that book. It was a few years before I saw a different fake book. Then it was something like "Hits of the 70s" or similar.

There were several fake books between the mid-50s and publication of the first Real Book. I have several of them, varying from large volumes to small ones with simple wire spiral binding. Some were thematic and others were just alphabetical collections of tunes of all kinds.

The original Real Book came out in 1975, after a few years of hard work by 2 Berklee students with Steve Swallow's help. They wanted to produce a current book useful to working musicians, and they wanted to make it as error-free as possible. They printed a few hundred copies to start, but they couldn't keep up with the demand. It spread like wildfire, with bootlegs of their bootleg circulating in large volumes. I think they produced 2 subsequent versions before Hal Leonard decided to make a legal Real Book. He got rights from the owners of all the songs and put out the first (AFAIK) legal book.

Now there are dozens of them out there. I have 39 pdfs on my tablet, and every once in a while I come across another one that looks good enough to acquire. The truth is that I've never used 20+ of the ones I have. But every once in a while, a vocalist or leader puts a tune on a play list that I never heard of - and many of those obscure titles are in one of the obscure fake books. Some of them even have original intros.

[rpjazzguitar]

1619 Broadway is the famous Brill Building.

[Strat-itis]

Monks music is hard and almost no one played it the way Monk did. It’s a different kettle of fish from GASB repertoire.

I agree. So I could definitely see a personal demonstration of the tunes as being valuable, even to Charlie Parker.

[Mick-7]

Monk saying he taught Charlie Parker the chords to some of his songs

[charlieparker]

People got good ears because the charts weren’t reliable. So there was a requirement for musicians to be in dialogue with any sheet music or lead sheets they did come across.

The Real Book was considered especially good when it came out. Which is funny in retrospect because it’s famously full of mistakes and superseded by more accurate books such as the Sher New Real Book. But it speaks to how sketchy the Fake books must have been.

As to how they developed this power, yes it is possible to learn it - but not from a jazz course. If you get into the standards thing you can learn tunes very quickly. You didn’t just learn them from a record player, you learned them listening to people on gigs play them, they had those tunes on jukeboxes, movies etc etc

FWIW I can learn changes quickly by ear because I’ve learned a lot of tunes over the years. In fact I’d rather learn them that way.

It’s a language with relatively few words, so it’s not exactly a flex. It’s not like taking down big band arrangements by ear at speed - I know people who can do that btw. It’s in the realm of humans.

For that reason it is a skill more people should apprentice themselves to and apps like iReal Pro offer a temptation not to do it.

I would say it’s harder now than then.

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That reminds me to work on transcribing changes more
I have learned quite a few heads and solos off of records but I haven't really learned the changes that way. I might make this focus area. Maybe that lego bricks stuff also helps with this kind of thing.

[AllanAllen]

I really like these changes, ascending inversions of the F Gb pedal.

[Mick-7]

I really like these changes, ascending inversions of the F Gb pedal.

I was hoping there are other recordings of Bird and Monk playing together but according to AM the only guy who did record them edited them to death -- The Complete Dean Benedetti Recordings of Charlie Parker | AllMusic

[GuyBoden]

I was hoping there are other recordings of Bird and Monk playing together but according to AM the only guy who did record them edited them to death -- The Complete Dean Benedetti Recordings of Charlie Parker | AllMusic

He only recorded Bird, there wasn't enough space in them days on a portable recording machine.

We are so lucky to have these Dean Benedetti recordings of Bird playing live.

[Mick-7]

He only recorded Bird, there wasn't enough space in them days on a portable recording machine.

We are so lucky to have these Dean Benedetti recordings of Bird playing live.

Space was not the problem - not counting the space between his ears. He only cared about Parker's solos, his recordings are all excerpts of performances.

"Dean Benedetti, a fanatical Charlie Parker disciple, recorded Bird extensively during three periods in 1947-1948, but did his best to turn off his wire recorder whenever anyone but Parker was soloing."

[GuyBoden]

Space was not the problem - not counting the space between his ears. He only cared about Parker's solos, his recordings are all excerpts of performances.

"Dean Benedetti, a fanatical Charlie Parker disciple, recorded Bird extensively during three periods in 1947-1948, but did his best to turn off his wire recorder whenever anyone but Parker was soloing."

I've been listening to the Benedetti recordings for quite a while.

He was a young sax player trying to learn Bird solos, so his recordings were really for himself, no one else.

Now, they're Historic recordings of Bird playing live, real gems.

[AllanAllen]

For context, there are no known recordings of James Jamerson on a jazz gig. So be grateful for what we do have, fragment or not.