Top 3 Jazz Fonts

Dorico
1

What are your top 3 music fonts for jazz?
I know some of the fonts here are more lean on Classical side, but I’ve seen jazz people using it all the time…

If you don’t know what they look like…
And some notes from the version history:

Finale Ash: a handwritten-style font, a modern recreation of the famous AshMusic font, based on the hand of copyist Ashley Wells.

Finale Broadway: a handwritten-style font, designed to emulate a thin nib ink pen.

Finale Jazz: a handwritten-style font, originally created by trumpeter Rich Sigler to emulate the hand copying of Clinton Roemer, using an oblique nib ink pen.

Finale Maestro: an engraved-style font, drawing on similar source material to Bravura, but with overall a less bold look.

Golden Age: a handwritten-style font, a modern recreation of Don Rice’s original Golden Age font, based on his own hand. The weight of the font is somewhere between the thinner appearance of Finale Broadway and the very bold appearance of Finale Jazz.

Leipzig: an engraved-style font, initially developed by Etienne Darbellay and Jean-François Marti as part of the Wolfgang music notation software and today most associated with the Verovio project. It has greater stroke contrast than either Bravura or Finale Maestro.

Leland: an engraved-style font, developed by Simon Smith and Martin Keary for MuseScore. It is designed to emulate the look of the venerable SCORE music notation software by the late Leland Smith.

Sebastian: an engraved-style font, developed by Florian Kretlow and Ben Byram-Wigfield. Like Bravura, the overall look of Sebastian is quite bold.

  • Bravura
  • Finale Ash
  • Finale Broadway
  • Finale Jazz
  • Finale Maestro
  • Golden Age
  • Leipzig
  • Leland
  • Petaluma
  • Sebastian
0 voters
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  1. Most of the best jazz publishers do not use a fake handwritten font, and just use a standard “engraved” font. Second Floor Music uses SCORE (and you point out Leland is an emulation). Jazz at Lincoln Center uses Maestro mostly, with some Sibelius mixed in. They are now switching over to Dorico and I helped Wynton’s copyist with a job for a recording session a week ago that was using the standard Bravura. The Chuck Sher New Real Book publications, after the first one, use a customized version of Graphire for the musical elements I think.

    In any case, most of the fake handwritten fonts are less legible than the traditional “engraved” fonts, and certainly aren’t fooling anyone that the music is actually hand copied, so why use them? The original 1970s era Real Book was just hand copied by a couple of Berklee students who were not great hand copyists, and is riddled with errors, both notational and musical, so it certainly is not a standard to be emulated in the computer notation era. What jazz publishers do you like? What do they use?

  2. Why limit yourself to one (or three) of these fonts? One of the nice features of Dorico is that it is highly customizable. I honestly can’t remember all the different fonts I’m using in my example below, but there certainly are elements of Bravura, Finale Maestro, Leipzig, Sebastian, CapoScore and Scherzo all in there. Quite possibly Leland, MTF Arnold, and Concerto too as I know I’m using them for certain elements. Use whatever glyphs from whatever font you want when you’re creating your house style!

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I’ve never wanted to like a post more!

It’s always astounded me when people want to recreate the effect of the Real Book – something which was done with the minimum of care – when modern computers and software are capable of extraordinary accuracy and complexity.

That having been said, as a fan of calligraphy, I’m interested in the idea of a decent font based on a beautiful simulated hand, drawn by someone taking their time to produce an elegant result. LS Iris is probably the closest to that I’ve seen.

4

I am too and was originally trained as a hand copyist. My own hand was admittedly “mid” but I certainly appreciate work by those with exceptional hands.

Some of the things that gives excellent hand copy work some “soul” are the little variances that are naturally built in: slurs that aren’t exactly symmetrical, stems and beams that aren’t perfectly straight, spacing that isn’t rigidly mathematical, etc.

Most of these Victor Young conductor’s parts from the 1930s-50s in the link below are pretty great, but no computer can actually come close to believably replicating this look without those little variances, so why try? The fake handwriting fonts just feel artificial and phony to me in comparison, which is definitely not the vibe I want to portray with the music!

(Oops, wrong link initially, fixed now)