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I understand that. I'd want to be sure before I jumped into something like that myself. I've spend money on things that didn't work for me before, they may have worked for others, but if they didn't work for me it wasn't a good investment of my hard earned cash.

And thanks for the kind words about my support. I try to treat my customers the way I would want to be treated if I were the customer.



I wouldn't either, but then I can see others doing it. Perhaps if I were a single instead of a duo and if I was doing background music instead of mini-concert or dance type venues. But I tend to be the type to spend a lot of time on the tunes I do before doing them.

On the other hand, I've played in enough jam sessions to see where Dennis is coming from.



I tried to do jazz, but found I needed a day-gig to support my jazz habit. There just isn't enough jazz around here to support a full-time jazz cat. So I play to the local market instead.

I was a regular in a weekly jazz that attracted people like Ira Sullivan, Duffy Jackson, Red Rodney and other greats (The guitarist used to work for Ira) but that was a once a week gig. Six other nights they brought in a pop music band. The jazz may have been mentally rewarding, but I had to pay the bills. When my other pop band started getting booked enough to cause conflicts, I had to quit the jazz thing. It was that or get a day gig, and to me that's the ultimate sell-out. (What? Work for someone else? Doing something other than music? -- I tried that twice and it didn't work out.)



I invented EXPANDED styles many years ago. They solve two problems that were not addressed in BiaB

• BiaB limits you to 4 chords per measure. Many of the songs in fake books have more than 4 chords in a measure.
• Many songs have a chord on a particular beat and a different chord on the eighth note before the same beat. In BiaB you cannot push a chord and have it play again the beat.

Solution:

By considering each measure in BiaB a 'cell' instead of a measure, and doubling the tempo, two cells in BiaB become one measure and you can put up to 8 chords in every measure of music - that includes one on the beat and the eighth before the same beat.

But to do that you need to double the tempo and use a style that was written to consider each BiaB cell a half measure.

My EXPANDED styles do just that. People who purchased them have called them amazing.



This is true. Many list the original chords of the song not the contemporary. And the chord substitutions seem to evolve with time. But for a quick request, I'm sure the chords in most major Fake Books would do. I do want to point out one major exception - the original, illegal Real Book. It seems to me that the people who did that book had the philosophy "If the chord is good enough to play, it's good enough to substitute" and IMHO many of the substitutions detracted from the melody of the tunes.



My Fake Disks number 3 and 14 go with the Dick Hyman books with the correct chords and Dick Hyman's substitutions. My Fake Disks 8 through 12 do the same thing but with Frank Mantooth's substitutions. They all include two versions of each song, one with the standard chords and another with the artist's substitutions.



Gotta agree. There is more than one right way to do most things, and especially play music. What sounds right to one musician might sound wrong to another. Jazz is about improvisation, and that includes the chord substitutions. But one must exercise taste as you can get too far away from the tune and lose most of your audience.

On the other hand, the great saxophonist Paul Desmond used to say he was a curmudgeon about playing the correct chords, and I find no fault with any of Desmond's work.

I save the requests that I don't know, and if I get enough requests for a particular song, I'll evaluate it and if I think we can do a decent job with it, we'll learn it. I have always had the attitude that if you stand on stage long enough, the public will tell you what they want to hear.

And if I don't know the request, I'll first compliment the requester on their taste in music, apologize for not knowing it, tell them we'll put it in our list of songs to learn, and try to get something close, either in the same style or by the same artist.

It might go like this for the fictitious song Snorkel Love by the fictitious Elvis Jones: "What a great song! We know it but I'm sorry, we just don't know how to play it. Wait a sec, I'll write it on our list of songs to learn. We can do another song by Elvis Jones, Dipsy Diver, or how about Island Mama by the group Carib-bean?"

Usually works (depending on the attitude and/or alcohol level of the requester).

Still, the idea of packing all 32 of my fake books with all the styles is intriguing. Like I said, I'm chicken to do so but in my mind's eye, I can see an advantage to it.

When I was 18 we used to go into a bar that had an organist playing (I forget his name) and his skill was that he learned a million songs. Had them all memorized. It was amazing, I've never seen him stumped by any legitimate request. And some of the patrons did try to stump him. I once asked him how he did it and he just said, "I don't know. I just can." It seemed that if he heard it anytime in his life, he could just play it.

So the idea of having BiaB, all the fake books and all the charts on a laptop lets me fantasize about being a guy like that. But I'll leave that to the brave, I'm still too chicken to do it.

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