The Real Book is a collection of lead sheets, each tune’s melody written out with chord symbols above it, covering hundreds of jazz standards and more recent jazz compositions. It was put together in the mid-1970s by two students at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, with help from members of the faculty, and was finished around 1975. Because no permission was sought from publishers or composers, it circulated as an unlicensed photocopy, sold under the counter in music shops and around campus.
Its clear, hand-lettered charts, which reflected how modern players actually performed the tunes, made it the unofficial handbook of jazz for generations of students, although its errors were copied too, and critics note that it encouraged musicians to treat one version of a song as definitive. In 2004 the publisher Hal Leonard released a licensed sixth edition that paid royalties to composers and imitated the original handwriting. For anyone writing jazz lo-fi, a Real Book chart is a quick way to see a standard’s harmony at a glance.