Hal Leonard Real Books - Accuracy?

[Christian Miller]

I like to think Metheny learned the Martino version and that’s why it’s in the RB. Metheny being in Burtons band which is the rumored original source of the sheets.

Maybe…. But then, why have Miles Smiles and Adams Apple as the source of the transcription at the bottom of the page? Who knows

Tbh the RB has enough errors in tunes easier to transcribe than Wayne Shorter originals for it just to be a mistake. It’s easy to see why someone might mishear it. Mostly afaik it was transcribed by Berklee students.

For the reasons you indicate I trust the originals written by composers associated with Berklee (such as Metheny, Burton and Swallow) quite a bit more than those outside that circle, because they are much more likely to have had access to the composers own lead sheets.

I’d be interested if anyone knows more, but I’m going to hang fire before throwing Metheny under the bus for the Footprints chart haha


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[Christian Miller]

As the OP, I meant it in the sense of glaringly bad chord choices that no one plays or other obvious "major mistakes." As I mentioned somewhere in this thread, at least for the tunes I know that are in common to sher books (I have the digital versions which don't have all of the tunes in the print NRB series) and HL, I haven't noticed any major differences. Some tunes have identical changes, and most others have really minor differences. I view all of these books as more data points that go along with recordings and other things I can access (e.g., Barry Greene's site) when learning a new tune. Certainly not the Bible or anything like that- lol.

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True, I think comparing lead sheets and recordings has taught me more about jazz harmony than any harmony theory text…. Or at least has given context to that info.

To me the difference between interpretation and a clear mistake is quite clear. We may quibble about whether it’s an Ebm(maj7) or Ab7#11 in Cherokee and even have strong Ethan Iverson style opinions about what’s right but that’s a clearly a different thing to writing Ebmaj7 Eb7 Abmaj7 Abm7 as the first four chords of four. The latter is just wrong.


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[AllanAllen]

Maybe…. But then, why have Miles Smiles and Adams Apple as the source of the transcription at the bottom of the page? Who knows

Another problem with my theory. I just listened to the Martino one and I hear 4 chords in the turnaround, not D7 to Db7.

[Rick5]

True, I think comparing lead sheets and recordings has taught me more about jazz harmony than any harmony theory text…. Or at least has given context to that info.

To me the difference between interpretation and a clear mistake is quite clear. We may quibble about whether it’s an Ebm(maj7) or Ab7#11 in Cherokee and even have strong Ethan Iverson style opinions about what’s right but that’s a clearly a different thing to writing Ebmaj7 Eb7 Abmaj7 Abm7 as the first four chords of four. The latter is just wrong.


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This is exactly what I was thinking when I made the original post, which brings me back to my original question. Are there any egregious errors in the HL books that people have caught? In retrospect, I guess it doesn't matter because I would find them anyway as an outlier when learning a tune because I always use multiple sources.

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[Christian Miller]

This is exactly what I was thinking when I made the original post, which brings me back to my original question. Are there any egregious errors in the HL books that people have caught? In retrospect, I guess it doesn't matter because I would find them anyway as an outlier when learning a tune because I always use multiple sources.

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There's always a risk of there being errors even in legal published sources, although they tend to be better than home brews like the original Real Book.

For example, there are mistakes in the Charlie Parker Omnibook. For a number of technological reasons I think the accuracy of transcribed material has improved massively (due to digital audio and software such as Transcribe whereas during the era of the original Real Book students were working from Vinyl records), mostly I think at the author end than the publisher end. I think it is unrealistic to expect the editors to be able to vet publications for musical errors, so you always have to have a degree of skepticism because the author is only human. The final say has to go to the recordings, although those can of course differ as well.

As far as HL books go I expect their first port of call was to assimilate the corrections in the 5th Ed erata, which I recall was fairly extensive, although I don't know if it was exhaustive (but as it was AFAIK based on the input of many working musicians, I daresay the communal 'wisdom of the crowd' caught the vast majority, if not all of the mistakes).

This is not limited to jazz. For instance, I've seen errors in published classical guitar materials, even for exams, which is kind of funny.