THE FOOD OF LOVE...

No, this is not about passion fruit or dates, it’s about music, which of course, has charms to soothe a savage breast, soften rocks, bend a knotted oak, and leap tall buildings in a single bound!

My regular reader will remember that towards the end of last year I reported the windup of Wikifonia, the lead sheet database, from which skillions of sheet music could be downloaded without login or subscription. So, there it was… gone like a long dog!

Since then, I have come across some ‘fake books’ that are available on the supersnicket,.and there is a chance that you might be able to find something to include in you show

Wikipedia defines a fake book as… “…a collection of musical lead sheets intended to help a performer quickly learn new songs. Each song in a fake book contains the melody line, basic chords, and lyrics* - the minimal information needed by a musician to make an impromptu arrangement of a song, or "fake it."

The sites are…

archive.org/details/fakebooks

archive.org/details/fakebook_the-firehouse-jazz-band-fake-book

meetup.com/NYCUkuleleJam/messages/boards/thread/5186315

valdez.dumarsengraving.com/557JazzStandards.PDF

jososoft.dk/yamaha/sheets.htm

realbooksite.com

Happy searching!

Only today, I happened upon the following site, which is in French, mes amis...

partitionsdechansons.com/

If you don’t parlez français, a quick translation will inform you that… “This website hosts only free songs free songs or filed with the consent of the author (?). Apart from these partitions, this site is a huge directory of free sheet music. It scans, it looks, it selects and offers all the best of the web PDF documents as links.”

Websites listed are offered not as recommendations, but purely for information. I have no connection with any of them, and I advise that anyone looking to download sheet music reads the conditions that pertain, before they press the return key.

*I still use the correct term, i.e. ‘lyric’, which The Free Dictionary defines as “The words of a song.”, but adds, “Often used in the plural.” Now, that’s dumb, because the word ‘words’ is already plural!