Dinner Jazz

Pop quiz: A round of cocktails, some witty repartee, a couple of candles illuminating a mouth-watering meal. What's missing from this dinner party? Why, jazz of course — the soft-but-swingin', breezy and easygoin' kind. Try "Take Five" for an appetizer, with Paul Desmond's breathy sax blowing sweet smoke rings around Dave Brubeck's pointed piano punctuation. Lead into a main course of "Comin' Home Baby" with Herbie Mann's lean, bluesy flute riffs riding rim-shot drum hits and a big-bottomed, dual-bass groove. And for dessert, don't mess around — dive right into the dreamy confection of "Corcovado" for a whispery croon under a Rio moon with the Brazilian-American jazz summit meeting of Jobim, Stan Getz, and Astrud & João Gilberto.

Velvety vixens bring sexy swing and cutting-edge jazzers reinvent rock ballads, in Next Steps.

You don't want to drag out the same tunes every time someone comes to dinner, so here are some more jazzy party pals guaranteed to keep the plates and cutlery clinking and the conversation sparkling without taking over the room. Modern jazz piano phenom Brad Mehldau works some musical alchemy, breathing misty, bewitching new life into the Beatles ballad "Blackbird." Miles Davis makes a meal of Gershwin's "Summertime," served up as a dim-lit, sultry slow-burner dripping with long, liquid-gold trumpet tones. And speaking of sultry, when Diana Krall takes a teasing-tigress turn on the old Louis Jordan swinger "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby?," you'd better make sure your ice cream doesn't melt.

It takes two in Deep Cuts, dishing up the juiciest jazz duets for dinnertime.

From amuse-bouche to digestif, everything goes down nice 'n' easy with some dynamic duos dreaming big and rewriting the proudest pages in the jazz-standard songbook. Stan Getz's warm, fuzzy sax is the perfect partner for Oscar Peterson's cool-injected piano pounce on "I Was Doing All Right." Bill Evans' painterly pianistics sound like they were born to bounce up against six-string shaman Jim Hall's pastoral picking. And when Cuban conga king Candido Camero dances around cool-jazz giant Al Cohn's simmering sax for a percolating take on "Cheek to Cheek," you can abandon any worries of a drop in the dinnertime vibe.

Finding the right dinner music can be as daunting as picking the perfect mate — it's got to be just right or else it won't work at all. It gets even tougher when you journey into jazz: it's got to swing, but not too hard; it's got to breathe, but it can't be too bland; it's got to tickle your fancy without wailing your eardrums out. So how do you find the swingin' songs for your soiree? Simple: Just concentrate on your menu and leave the mood-making to us. From the mambo moves of Cal Tjader to the blues-baked organ jams of Jimmy Smith, we've worked up the ultimate aural entree for jazz lovers and neophytes alike, tasty enough to melt in your mouth and cool enough to lend the simplest table a ton of class.