When Dinner works
There is exactly one rule for dinner music and it's about voices. A singer in the room competes with the people at the table; an instrumental does not. So the vocal records here are the ones where the voice sits low, close and conversational, and everything else is a trio.
The second rule, which is really the first rule again, is about drums. Anything with a kick drum that announces itself will make everyone speak a little louder, and an hour later nobody will know why they are tired.
Two hours is the slot because that is how long dinner takes when it's going well.
Where it came from
This is the one page here that is about a job rather than a genre. The idea that a room should have music written for it, which nobody is meant to listen to, is Erik Satie's: he called it musique d'ameublement in 1917 and his audience annoyed him by falling silent and listening.
The industrial version followed. The Muzak company was selling programmed background music by 1934, with the volume and the tempo planned against the hour of the working day — the same arithmetic this site uses, applied to factories rather than evenings.
What restaurants actually reached for was none of that. It was the cool-jazz records of the fifties, which happened to be quiet, happened to have no choruses to sing along to, and happened to be played by people who had learned to fill a room without raising their voices.
Dinner: five records
- Chet Baker, 1956Chet Baker Sings.
A trumpeter singing quietly because he could not sing loudly. The limitation makes the record. Baker sang into a close microphone at a volume that would have been inaudible in the room, and the record still works at conversation level because of it.
- Bill Evans Trio, 1962Waltz for Debby.
Recorded live with the audience audible. The clink of glasses on the tape is not a flaw here, it is the point. The two nights at the Vanguard in June 1961 produced both this record and Sunday at the Village Vanguard; the trio never played together again.
- Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, 1956Ella and Louis.
Oscar Peterson's quartet, no arrangements to speak of, two people enjoying themselves. The two of them had sung together for twenty years and recorded together almost never; Norman Granz put them in a room and let the tape run.
- Nina Simone, 1959Little Girl Blue.
Her first record, cut in a single session, before anyone told her what she was supposed to be. She was playing in an Atlantic City bar and singing only because the owner insisted; the voice on it is still a pianist's voice.
- Stan Getz and João Gilberto, 1964Getz/Gilberto.
On the jazz page too, and the only record here that belongs in both rooms without apology. The album sold two million copies and gave bossa nova to the American middle of the road, which is both why it is on two pages here and why it is easy to underrate.
The honest objection
Waltz for Debby has applause on it, and plenty of people find a live record at the dinner table irritating rather than atmospheric. If that is you, the Village Vanguard sessions have a studio-quiet alternative in Portrait in Jazz, recorded in 1959, and the page is better for you with that swap.
The faces on the records
William Gottlieb photographed the New York clubs between 1938 and 1948 for Down Beat and the Washington Post. The Library of Congress holds the negatives; the pictures are in the public domain.
