One of our projects is to produce lead sheets of songs which are hard to find. These are simple lead sheets with melody and chords which, for the most part, are not complete transcriptions of the records used as the source. You will notice that many of the "old warhorses" in the Dixieland repertoire are missing. We have concentrated on the more obscure. We recommend Dave Littlefield's excellent fake books as a source of your basic repertoire. (Our band: "The Maine Street Paraders" uses his books which are available on the The American Music Caravan website.)
There are a couple of lead sheet examples on this site. They use the Sibelius "Scorch" program to display and play the leadsheet. If you do not have this browser helper, you should be prompted to download it from the Sibelius site.
A list of the lead sheets produced to date is shown below, by selecting the "boxed" letter (above) with which the song title begins.
The purpose of this project is for me to explore some of the lesser known (largely early) jazz tunes and to provide lead sheets for the Maine Street Paraders" jazz band. At times I respond to requests to provide copies. That is why the list is here. To show that there is a lead sheet available. This, however, is qualified by the fact that some of the lead sheets need rework before sharing them and that the long term intent is to sell them. For that reason they are not on the website for download, but I will definitely accept the concept of trading for your lead sheets.
Lead sheets are produced with Sibelius and Band In The Box. The basic lead sheets produced are Concert Pitch, Concert Pitch Bass Clef and Bb Instrument (transposed up a major 2nd.) In some cases there is also a "Concert Pitch with Lyrics" chart. These are in the form of PDF files with references to the seminal recording listings at the Red Hot Jazz site. Where actual recordings exist at that site a link is provided which is "active". Click it with a mouse and the Real Audio file will play if you are attached to the Internet.
In some cases Band In The Box is used to produce a stylized rendition of the tune in both
Band In the Box song file format and an additional midi file. Further, Sibelius is capable of
producing a file in the language Music XML, which can, with the appropriate program
"Dolet for Finale", by Recordare be read into Finale providing
more information than would a midi file. We do not do this yet as user programs like Dolet run fast in Finale,
but terribly slowly in Sibelius which we use.
Note: the size of the frames on this page can be adjusted by dragging the frame edges, above or below.
Also, scroll the list with the page up and down buttons. It's easier.