Hey, Larry. Did I say the Real Books are correct? I must have zoned that out...

And it's irrelevant that it appears you can't copyright song titles. We're not talking just the titles alone, where talking the titles AND the chords. Many songs use one chord for each melody note or maybe half of them or whatever. What then? The chords are part of the melody. Hmmmm. Who wants to get sued and have to go to court to prove it especially someone who's running a well known commercial company?

When it comes to fakebooks the beauty and problem with jazz is it's well, jazz. Every good player will use different chord subs, different voicings, different bass lines. There is no one correct way to play any of those tunes. Just watch YT vids about how to play Misty or Green Dolphin Street on piano or guitar. You'll find 10 good players doing it 10 different ways. Similar but different, it's jazz.

You can't blame the music majors who transcribed those chords because it's for fakebook format. They're not transcribing a recording perfectly, that's not it's purpose. The book says the first chord of Misty is Ebmaj7 for four beats. Is that what Errol Garner played? No. What he really played won't even fit on a single page fakebook chart. A master pianist is chording and reharmonizing every note of the melody plus adding little embellishment but all that is basically over Ebmaj7, and diminished, and an 11th and a tritone, and... But, boil it down everybody agrees the tonality is Ebmaj7.

The purpose of a fakebook chart is to give you the basic outline of the song and the basic chord structure. That's it. Everything else is up to the player. If you want it correct you have to buy the correctly transcribed 3 or 4 page sheet music of Misty. That's not fitting into a fakebook and you can't enter all that into Biab either. But what Biab will do is take that Ebmaj7 chord and do some of it's own embellishments.

Sometimes the books do get it wrong. Footprints is an example. The basic chords are simple. Cm11, Fm9. Then comes the turnaround. The books all say Ebm to Dm. Not correct. It's actually F#, F, E, A but those four chords are half diminished and altereds. Those chords are following the melody. They can be played all kinds of similar but different ways. Listen to the various versions of that tune and nobody is just doing Eb to D. How or why the books all say that is beyond me.

Bob

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