Four for Cocktails, Conversation and Dining

So it was Thanksgiving night at our place. The whole family was over for dinner at our new house: 13 people with a very broad spectrum of (musical) tastes, ranging in age from 3 to 70. What to do about the music?

There were voices quietly agitating for the sound of the TV, others recommending the holiday music option. Both were unacceptable: Thanksgiving is just too early to bust out the Christmas tunes, which now dominate the entire month of December. Thanksgiving is a separate holiday from Christmas, and since Christmas looms over all other holidays like the sun over our solar system, we need to do all we can to protect the individual identity of poor Thanksgiving. Hence, no Christmas music.

Thanksgiving is essentially a family social holiday and nothing kills social interaction more thoroughly than TV with its audio-visual gravity sucking in all within range - again like the sun and our solar system. The visual aspect of TV conveys the critical information of a sporting event - and the program in question was football - without demanding all of the viewer's attention, so I opted for TV on with sound down, and non-holiday unobtrusive music.

The key to "unobtrusive" music is for it to be interesting and of high quality without irritating or startling anyone, or slipping into the insipid "elevator" rut on the other side of the road. Ideally, we want a light yet rhythmic sound with a charming personality.

These selections worked very well in that regard:

Dave Brubeck Quartet - Time Out
Nothing gets the mood centered better than classic cool (not "smooth," God forbid) jazz, and there isn't much cool jazz better than Brubeck's piano and alto sax (the great Paul Desmond) tour de force album from 1959, built around the theme of nonstandard time signatures. "Take Five" - selected by NPR as one of the 100 most important musical works of the 20th century - was the best-selling jazz single of the century and is the most famous song ever written in 5/4 time (Pink Floyd's "Money" is a close second). "Blue Rondo A la Turk" is also instantly recognizable.

Article Author: Eric Olsen

Career media professional Eric Olsen is honored to be the founder and former publisher of Blogcritics.org, and former publisher of Technorati.com, which both rule. He is now editor, co-founder, and CEO of The Morton Report.

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