Ted Gioia is a music historian and jazz critic with several books to his credit, including the very readable History of Jazz. I recently picked up his latest, The Jazz Standards - A Guide to the Repertoire (published by Oxford University Press), and it is a fascinating and entertaining reference work.
Gioia, who is also a jazz pianist, recalls finding out early that there were "200 or 300" songs which a jazz musician needed to be thoroughly familiar with, although there was no definitive list of these works. He only began to have a clear idea of what the canon was in the early 1970s when an illegal compilation of lead sheets for the standard jazz repertoire, produced by students at the Berklee College of Music, began to circulate among musicians.
It was called The Real Book to distinguish it from the various "fake books" in circulation which gave a sketchier idea of the chords and melodies of many of the same compositions. Some of the confusion, Gioia points out, arose because the tunes in these books came from such diverse sources.
"Most of them had been composed before I was born [in 1957], and even the more recent entries in the repertoire weren't part of the fare you typically heard on TV or mainstream radio. Some of these tunes came from Broadway, but not always from the hit productions - many first appeared in obscure or failed shows, or revues by relatively unknown songwriters," he notes in the introduction to the book.
"Others made their debut in movies, or came from big bands, or were introduced by pop singers from outside the jazz world. A few - such as Autumn Leaves or Desafinado - originated far away from jazz's land of origin. And, of course, many were written by jazz musicians themselves, serving as part of the legacy of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and other seminal artists."
Most jazz musicians own a copy of a fake book or The Real Book, although - with the exception of a Hal Leonard edition of the latter, which came out in 2004 and for which the publisher pays songwriter loyalties - all infringe copyrights. However, most musicians will know the history of only some of the tunes in those collections, and before this no book existed to fill in those gaps in almost everybody's knowledge.