This web site is a resource for Jazz students like myself who are learning tunes from the Real Book. Often, when I learn a new tune I like to listen to the "head". Amazon.com is a great resource for that. The 1st minute of an audio sample is often sufficient to hear the head of most of the tunes in the Real Book. Having done this type of search so many times, I assume that others would benefit from a website linking each Real Book tune to appropriate free audio samples. The site is based on the "C" 5th (illegal) version of the Real Book. One of these days, I'll expand it to cover the new legal versions and Volumes 2 and 3.

In addition, I've recently needed to deepen some web-skills, so this is my PHP and MySQL training project. What I didn't realize was that most of the work would be endless hours of collecting data ;-)

The entries I've chosen are intended to provide audio samples of the "head" and have not been vetted as the best samples to learn from. I welcome any additional suggestions, improvements or comments on the existing selections. There are a few tunes for which I could not find recordings or information (click here for the list). I'd appreciate any help on these.

I've also tried to find original recordings of the tune and a composer's recording. Where possible, I also included the recordings cited in the Real Book. I often included links to these even if there was no audio sample available.

A great resource for finding different recordings of a particular tune is the All Music Guide (AMG) . If you search by song title you can easily find the various recordings for a particular tune.

If you decide to purchase CDs or music by clicking through realbooklisten.com, I should get a few pennies as a referral fees. If you prefer to buy them elsewhere, no offense taken ;-). If you would like to contribute to the maintenance and development of the site, you may do so via paypal:

New! (May 2006)   I've added some new capabilities. Tune pages now link to the iTunes music store when a recording is available. If you have iTunes software installed on your computer, you can listen to 30 seconds for free or buy the whole track for 99 cents. I hope to link to other download sites soon - they all carry slightly different selections.

I've also inclued a play-along section. The selections point to product pages on SheetMusicPlus.com because their music-related book catalog is more complete than Amazon's and they have cheap shipping. But, before you buy, check and see if you can get it cheaper on Amazon or elsewhere.

Please send comments and suggestions, I will incorporate your feedback into the site.