My Life as a Fakebook

That's the working title of a project I've been working on for a couple of years. I'd been wanting to publish a fakebook of some of my tunes for quite a long time, and I seriously got underway in 2007 when I had to do leadsheets for the other musicians who played on the CD Sometimes Things Work Out. At the same time, I wanted to share some stories from my career as a musician. I was looking at Charles Mingus's book More Than a Fakebook, and I liked how his leadsheets were interspersed with stories, anecdotes, and performance notes.

Good enough for Mingus, good enough for me.

So far, I've completed about 30 leadsheets, and maybe a dozen stories. I'm far short of where I need to be before I print up some copies (in C, Bb, Eb, and Bass transpositions, of course) and start dragging them out to jam sessions. I'd like to have about a hundred tunes and possibly a couple of dozen stories before I stop writing and start polishing it up.

I also learned a good lesson from the Sometimes Things Work Out CD project; my first print run will be in single-digit quantities. (CDs are still in stock -- get them while they last!)