This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

Since the mid 1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book.

It has a peach colored cover, a chunky 70s style logo, and black plastic binding.

It is delightfully homemade looking, like it was printed by a bunch of teenagers at Kinko's. And inside is the sheet music for hundreds of common

jazz tunes, also known as jazz standards, all meticulously notated by hand. It's called the real book.

When I started playing jazz, I remember the first thing my guitar teacher said was,

well, you gotta buy a real book.

That's producer, Michael McCaffinoff. Everybody had one. It just felt like something you were

expected to own if you were a serious musician. My high school jazz teacher

Mr. Leonard had stacks of real books on his desk, and he told me that he actually got his first real book at the place where they were originally published.

Berkeley College of Music in Boston. He had just arrived for his freshman year.

I heard people talking about the real book. The real book is... he had a

a freshman year. I heard people talking about the real book, the real book, it was just all around, but they were everywhere, everywhere.

You were told when you had an ensemble,

bring a real book, we're going to do with some tunes out of that.

But pretty quickly, Mr. Leonard of that. But pretty quickly Mr. Leonard discovered that the real book wasn't like the other books he needed to get for his classes. You couldn't just

buy a copy in the campus bookstore. There was a guy who used to stand on the corner of Mass Ave near Boilsen Street and he had a box and he would sit there and he'd just, hey,

you want to buy a real book, want to buy a real book, that kind of thing. For Mr Leonard's description, this guy basically sounded like he wandered out of a ZZ Top concert.

You know, jeans, really, really long, like mid-back-level hair, big beard,

and as I understood it, he used to get a... mid-back-level hair, big beard.

And as I understood it, he used to get arrested

about once every two weeks.

...