Jazz musicians would riff and freestyle over these songs. The art of improvisation has always been a key art form of jazz music. But what made the average gigging trumpeter or sax player truly valuable was their ability to play any one of hundreds of songs right there on the spot. To be prepared for any request, musicians would bring stacks and stacks of sheet music to every gig. But lugging around a giant pile of paper could be really cumbersome-this is where the Tune-Dex came in. Someone figured out that you could gather together a bunch of Tune-Dex cards, print copies of them on sheets of paper, add a table of contents and a simple binding, and then sell the finished product directly to musicians in the form of a book. They called them “fake books” because they helped musicians fake their way through unfamiliar songs. These first fake books were cheaper than regular sheet music, and a lot more organized. They became an essential tool for this entire class of working musicians.
Musicians loved these new fake books, but the music publishers hated them. They wanted musicians to buy legal sheet music, and so the publishing companies started cracking down on fake book bootleggers. That, of course, didn’t stop the bootleggers and by the 1950s, there were countless illegal fake books in existence, which were being used in nightclubs all across the country.īebop was just the beginning. Over several decades, jazz exploded into this constellation of different styles. Meanwhile, the economics of jazz shifted too. There were fewer clubs, smaller paychecks, and more university jazz programs with steady teaching gigs.
The ivory tower, not the nightclub, increasingly became a place for young musicians to learn, and for established musicians to earn a living. And if you’re going to jazz school, you need jazz books. The fake books at the time hadn’t kept up with the music.
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