Dinner Party

Want to know the single most important item on the menu for your next dinner party? Simple: it's music. People will overlook the slightly scorched steak or the mismatched silverware, but they'll never forget the vibe. Who better to ease the evening into a relaxed groove than Norah Jones, with her satin-over-smoke rendition of the triple-GRAMMY® Award winner "Don't Know Why." Sade turns up the steamy heat in the quiet-storm sensuality of "The Sweetest Taboo," sexy and sultry as a summer night in Copacabana. And speaking of Brazil, the lovely Diana Krall slips south of the border for some gently swaying bossa bliss in "The Look of Love."

In Next Steps, our dinner music takes a manlier turn . . . and a worldlier one too.

The ladies had their mood-setting say in our Basics set, so now we'll put the vibe in the guys' gifted hands. Nobody signals the Stork Club swellegance of Big Apple chic like Cole Porter, and the ever-dapper Fred Astaire glides through his "Night and Day" like a Rolls-Royce on cruise control. Tropicalista master Jorge Ben saunters into a suave samba ambiance in "Mas Que Nada," adding an exotic dash of spice — em Português — to the evening's musical mix. And sometimes, the most impressive way to say something is not to say anything at all, as Miles Davis proves in the instrumental eloquence of "So What," from his if-you-only-have-one-jazz-album-this-must-be-it collection, Kind of Blue.

In Deep Cuts, we have three rather unusual covers on the evening's menu . . . so dig in.

As we clear the table and break out the coffee at evening's end, our Deep Cuts offers some of your favorite artists and your favorite songs . . . in ways you've never heard them before. The Sundays fuse equal parts of the Cowboy Junkies and the Rolling Stones into their almost hymnlike cover of the latter's "Wild Horses." If you want a glimpse of Chris Isaak's roots — or at least part of them — you need look no further than the angst-packed, falsetto-fringed pop of "Only the Lonely," originally cut by Roy Orbison when Isaak was still in kindergarten. And in perhaps the coolest — and weirdest — reworking in this entire set, Madeleine Peyroux flashes a little sunshine onto the sawdust-floor melancholy of Leonard Cohen's "Dance Me to the End of Love," transforming it from a gloomy final fling into a come-hither cabaret croon.

The table is set, the Champagne is chilling, and the veal piccata is quietly bubbling in the saucepan. But your dinner party is still missing one key ingredient: the ideal music. If, as Shakespeare suggests, music be the food of love, then we've got a gourmet feast all set up for you, one that spans more than half a century. Whether your taste runs to standards — think Duke, Ella, and the Chairman of the Board — or you're looking for a little alt-ier groove, like AIR, Rufus Wainwright, and Zero 7, we've got it, in our hand-picked Dinner Party Essentials. All you have to do is load up your iPod, press play, and wait for the wonderfulness. Oh — and take the veal piccata off the stove before it scorches, willya? Your guests will thank you.