A friend of mine is getting married in a couple of months. She asked me to help her with music selections for the reception. She acted like it was a big imposition, but not at all -- to be honest, when she start talking I thought she was going to ask me to DJ the reception, and when I realized she just wanted music suggestions I was so relieved that it seems like nothing at all.
She asked me for three kinds of music: "cocktail hour," "dinner hour" and "dancing." I have a pretty good handle on dinner music and dance music, but what the heck is cocktail music? How does it differ from the other two kinds? Somebody help me out, please! I want to do a good job with this.
i think of astrud gilberto, particularly "the girl from ipanema" when i think of cocktail music. does that help?
i'm not entirely sure of the subtle differences, either... but i would think that "cocktail" implies something a little more, uh, sultry maybe? like, julie london-esque? more soft croony things (ballads and such) than things with a danceable beat.
definitely the bossa nova
and johnny hartman
Light piano jazz (George Shearing, Marian McPartland). Bobby Short. Chet Baker. The "Velvet Fog" side of Mel Torme.
what you all describe is what I had thought of as dinner music -- mellow, kind of fades into the background so it doesn't distract from your meal. So maybe it's actually dinner music that I don't understand :)
ps: Sean, I just got a Dizzy Gillespie album with a lot of Johnny Hartman tracks. Good stuff!
Searches for "dinner music" turn up mentions of: background, unobtrusive, instrumental. For "cocktail music" it seems to be a bit more upbeat -- you could probably mix in Martin Denny, Les Baxter, etc. And more tracks with vocals.
Slightly bland, slightly (but not too) upbeat with a hint of the cosmopolitan ... must be a little bit boring so that people actually want to talk over it rather than listen to it. Like when I think of Bebel Geilberto, for example, I always think "This would be quite nice to hear in the background, but when I'm doing nothing else but listening to it I get very, very bored." So maybe Bebel would make good cocktail music.
You should include "The Return of the Los Palmas 7" by Madness (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrNUdAat_fg), which I always rather liked, actually.