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During the academic year 1974--75, two students at the Berklee College of Music in Boston created a bootleg fake book called The Real Book. The Real Book endeavored to notate what professional jazz musicians would really play, in contrast to the simplified versions typically given out on sheet music and Tune-Dex cards. Steve Swallow, a professional bassist teaching at Berklee at that time, reports that the students' intention was "to make a book that contained a hipper, more contemporary repertoire. They thought about what would be involved in doing it legally but didn't have the time or money to pay royalties." And so they did it illegally, "publishing" at local copy shops a book of approximately 400 jazz tunes in 1975.

Swallow noticed the effect of The Real Book as he walked past rehearsal rooms at Berklee. "A month after The Real Book was published, all of a sudden I was hearing the right 'changes' to tunes that had been butchered," he observed. "It used to be a hilarious journey down the corridor, to hear the flagrant harmonic violations spewing out of these rooms. It's not to say that all of a sudden everything sounded great and it was Bill Evans at every turn, but there was a huge improvement."

The fact that The Real Book became, unexpectedly, the jazz bible, did not trouble Swallow. He acknowledged that "these particular 400 tunes were canonized at the expense of what they left out, and they left out plenty." But its compilers "were accurately reflecting what college jazz people were listening to at that time and skimming the cream of that repertoire."

Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny expanded on this thought: "It was the first book that reflected the ecumenical nature of jazz," with tunes drawn from swing, bop, blues, ballads, Latin jazz, jazz-rock, and other styles. The Real Book, said Metheny, "caused a few generations of players to have to develop skills that were rare at that time--only the very best players of that era would be able to go from start to finish in that book and be able to deal with the intrinsic musical requirements that such a book would demand. Nowadays, it is pretty common; and in fact, sort of required."

Today, despite the subsequent appearance of numerous legitimate rivals, The Real Book continues to be used extensively due to its unmatched combination of tasteful repertoire and idiomatic representation. It is a story of happenstance, of a casual student effort transforming itself into a creative act of immense significance and surviving only because bootleg fake books were by this time flying beneath the radar, as far as federal criminal prosecution was concerned. Metheny said: "It still is kind of unbelievable to me when I see it almost thirty years later now, on bandstands from Kiev to Bali, knowing its history like I do. Believe me, no one involved would have ever imagined it."

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