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For some of us, it's been a long, stressful year. We've had sports drama galore, relentless political dissension, meteorological terror, and who knows how many personal dramas that nobody knows about but our own self. Stress and drama, stress and drama, stress and drama. And more stress and drama. And now the holiday season bears down on us, which inevitably brings...you know what it brings. Probably the last thing anybody's looking for in a December Blindfold Test is a lot of "difficult" music (or "a lot" of anything, really...). December's a busy month and you probably won't have the time or the inclination for that. A short collection of nice tunes that doesn't eat up a lot of physical time and mental space, that's the ticket, some stuff you can listen to in the car while shopping, or at work or, maybe, the bedroom. But - you still want music that's got some substance to it, not some trite bunch of superficial piffle You like to chill out but not to go brain-dead in the process. So what I've gone for here is both substance and style - music that can be enjoyed at the surface level, but also music with more than enough substance to reward the kind of immersion that we like to experience if/when we have the time. And fwiw, I think that this particular mix will get an overall favorable rating on the Wife/Girlfriend/Date/Etc. scale. It did here. That'll reduce a lot of stress right there! When creating this set-list, I had just a few prerequisites - it had to come in at under an hour, the selections needed to flow well, yet contrast with each other, and everything had to have smile-inducing potential for both the Organissimo audience and a broader, more general audience, the kind of people we end up spending a lot of time around at this time of year. And NO HOLIDAY SONGS!!! To that end, there are 14 selections, and the disc lasts 58 minutes. The one thing every track has in common is that every one of them has at some point sent me into one or more sessions of obsessive track-repeating because of the groove they hit (and by "groove", I mean the tempo of each piece, and how the performance makes love to that tempo. The tempos will vary, but that aspect of the performances will not, or at least, have not to me). And NO HOLIDAY SONGS!!! Not going to be a whole lot of straight-up 4/4 swing (but what there is is choice), and there will be a larger-than-usual performances featuring voices and/or electric instruments, as well as a few things that straddle the line between jazz & R&B (and other "popular musics"). But those things all wear their jazz on their sleeve quite explicitly. Still, if that's a hardcore deal-breaker, well, there it is. So, if you'd like to participate in the collection of Discriminating Music For Non-Critical Listening, please let me know. My PM box has this annoying tendency to fill up faster than I clean it out, so feel free to email me through the board, or directly at musicaconcarne@yahoo.com Downloads or hard copies will be available, so take your pick. Thanks in advance to the venerable Jeff Crompton for his invaluable assistance in distribution. And now, back to BFT 104 - some good stuff on their that has yet to be identified. Please help!