That comment is right on Eddie. Not just with Mustang Sally either but all the classic jazz Real Book songs. All a Real Book is supposed to be is a way to fake your way through a tune you never played before maybe once or twice on a gig but the group should know everything else.

The problem is none of the bands I play with rehearse and that's true with most groups now. Everybody is just too busy with other things so we get together on a gig and basically fake everything. That can be fun if the players are good but many times one or two are and one or two are not. There are so many different ways these tunes have been done over the years that nobody knows which version it's going to be.

Just like Mustang Sally the original recordings done by the legendary artists have all kinds of very cool hooks, rhythms, breaks and other stuff going one. A jam band playing the same song out of a fake book isn't doing any of that.

Take Joy Spring for example, it has that intro that nobody knows, it has punches throughout the head that nobody knows. Here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tBJa8Ew6fQ

I know all that but I can't do it on piano by myself because nobody is doing it with me. One time a fill in bass player asks me if I do that intro and I said yes. I quickly told the band he and I were doing that and I would cue the entrance for the head. Since this was five second quick instruction on the gig, that entrance was still sloppy and it sucked. Just one minute of a quick rehearsal would have fixed that but on the gig we didn't have one minute so it was a waste of time to try to do that intro.

When I happen to do some of these standards what do I think of a lot of the times? Biab. Biab is fun and useful and all that but it cannot create a cover version of anything and we've talked about that lots of times.

If you find a Biab version of Joy Spring, the chords are there, the swing style is there but there's zero elements that can be heard on the original I just posted and that's exactly what happens when a group does these tunes out of a fake book, it's sort of like live Biab. Either the players know this tune or they don't so everybody just counts it off on the head, everybody can play the changes ok and solo ok but all these cool little elements in the original recording are not there.

The only reason I still do these gigs is I'm one of the biggest hams on the West Coast, haha. The audience doesn't know any of these things, they still think I'm great, they are still having a good time, I get positive comments and I love that. It's just that I know it could be so much better but alas, it probably never will be.

Bob

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