Where To Buy The Real Book - Volume I: Eb Edition

I have found Amazon.com very good at delivering books very promptly and at very good prices which is why I use them as my primary vendor. I'm going to offer some final thoughts on the Real Book Series. The Hal Leonard Corp has endeavoured to produce a legitimate Real book for Jazz Musicians. As previously mentioned it's not perfect but neither was the 5th edition, and no doubt in a few years time we will see a 7th edition but for now I'll make do with the 6th edition. I have purchased all 3 volumes in B Flat, E Flat, Bass Clef and C Concert. Here is what I note about the new Hal Leonard volumes, there are 143 tunes missing from volume 1, 170 missing from volume 2 and 159 missing from volume 3. That's 472 tunes in total missing in comparison to the earlier 5th Edition (Volume 4 perhaps?) but to counter this loss Hal leonard have added about 508 totally new tunes so its not a complete disaster (new numbers include some very nice classics such as `Nuages', `Night in Tunisia', `Beyond the Sea', `Jump, Jive & Wail' and so on. I'd say their is about 3 dozen classic standards missing from the new edition numbers such as `The Shadow of your smile' vol 1, `Sweet Georgia Brown', `Blue Moon' vol 2 and `Stars fell on Alabama' vol 3. These are personal favourites so these are going to be loose sheets at the back of the new real book. I count approx 1360 tunes in the present Real Book series so plenty to be working on and still a good selection of standards to choose from.

If jazz musicians don't buy these books and choose to use the illegal PDF's and under the counter previous versions it's unlikely that the Hal Leonard Corp will consider it financially viable to produce an improvement on this edition, also your doing a disservice to the musicians and their families who rightly deserve the royalties for their works. Its not like these books are expensive to buy and they are well worth having for what they give you. Most working/gigging musicians in the know are aware of the importance of the Real books and the impact they have had over the last 3 decades.
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