Real Book Rankings Index
I've raved about JazzStandards.com before. They did an extensive study of prominent recordings of jazz standards and ranked the top 1000. Discarding the obvious doubts of such a study (What makes a standard? Who's prominent?), their ranked list is useful for filling repertoire gaps or recalling forgotten tunes.
I made a list of tunes from those rankings that appear in The Real Book (Volume I, Sixth Edition). I included page number, rank, and title for each tune. I color-coded for ranking: red is top 100, blue is top 250, yellow is top 500, the rest are top 1000. To boot, I formatted it to fit on a single page, so I could paste it in the inside cover of my Real Book.
This is coming in handy. Part of my practice every day is learning new music. This gives me plenty of material, and it's roughly prioritized by popularity. And if everyone has this book at a jam session, I can glance over my color-coded quick list for a song to call instead of the entire index. I'll probably do the same thing for volumes II and III.
Mark Wein (19 Nov 2009 at 10:15pm)
That's actually a pretty cool way of organizing what is an insane amount of music to be learned. I had a sub jazz gig last weekend (the first one in about a year) and what I realized was that my repertoire had pretty much disappeared through neglect. I might use your list as a study guide if I can set aside some time to work through it....
David (26 Jun 2010 at 6:39am)
This is a fantastic PDF. Loved it. I'm starting to real the sax and this will be my reference document for choosing my next to learn standard.
Please, please, please, do the same for the Book 2 and 3. That would be awesome.
Cheers
Joe (26 Jun 2010 at 12:04pm)
David, glad to hear it's so helpful. I'm re-inspired to get this done for the other books. I'll start with the other Hal Leonards and move to the Chuck Shers. I'll make it my goal to get the next one done by Monday. Thanks!
David (26 Jun 2010 at 3:07pm)
Wow, that's great news! Can't wait. Today I picked 3 of the red one from Real Book 1. I'll go throw it with your colorfoul help.
Cheers
Carlos Ben Ari (4 Jul 2010 at 12:42am)
Great work. I will use the indexes with my pupils, in the Jazz Starters Combo.
Thanks for the sharing!