This is how it happens.

You’re home alone one evening. You’re tired of amassing footnotes for the article you’re writing about the demise of labor unions. That very cheap Pinot Grigio has gone down a little too easily.

A friend sends you an email about a fado singer who’s coming to town.

The music is a little schmaltzy. Well, isn’t fado just like that? Yes, and it’s fine when the Portuguese mandolin twitters in the background to lend a little authenticity to the sound. But with these modern arrangements the smaltz simply gets to be too much.

Yet you’re surprised you can actually listen to the Mp3 file that came along with the two glamorous photos, and you’re suddenly inspired to see what other free downloads you can find on-line.

Not knowing the slightest thing about illegal downloads, you end up in I-tunes, which you actually signed up for by mistake in response to a newspaper ad for E-music—whatever that is.

You have just gotten your new Visa bill, which is filled with charges for gas stations, grocery stores, restaurants, low-fare airline tickets, car repairs, charities for organizations doing good things in the mountains of Pakistan, and on-line used-book outlets. In the midst of all of this, the higher math tells you that a .99 charge for anything will not prove significant. And so you decide to download a few tunes you always liked, and in fact still have in vinyl versions down in the basement. First of all, “Chinese Cafe” by Joni Mitchell. But from then on the choices become more difficult.

You hope to locate a great cut you remember from a cassette tape you have with John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, but you can’t remember the name of the song. However, in the Coltrane section you find several rather long tunes with a good rhythm section from the late 50s, before Coltrane got religion. Three tunes, twenty-five minutes of music, three dollars. Not bad!

You discover that Gwen Stefani doing “Hullaballo Baby” doesn’t quite fit into the mix.

You search for early tracks by Kenny Barron and Sonny Fortune that you once loved, to no avail.

You explore the offerings from the early Los Lobos albums, but can’t remember if you already have them on an anthology CD.

You locate the single album available by the fado singer in question, and reconfirm your impression—she’s no Mariza.

You look for tracks from an old Andrew Hill album with the young Greg Osby that you have on cassette tape. No luck.

Falling deeper into the nostalgia mode, you decide to see if I-tunes has any tracks from one of

your favorite albums of youth, Archie Shepp’s “Mama Too Tight.” They have the short ones...but not the long gritty ones.

But you do notice that Shepp has recently recorded a duet album with the pianist Mal Waldron, who recorded so many great duet albums with Steve Lacy. You need a few tracks to fill out the CD you’re going to burn of the Coltrane numbers, and you always admired Shepp’s version of “Sophisticated Lady” that still lurks in your basement in the vinyl version.

In the end you burn a CD—to play in the car while traversing the deserts of Califonia, that’s made up of the following tracks:

John Coltrane: “Don’t Take Your Love from Me,” “My Ideal,” “I’ll Get By.” Then Archie Shepp: “Everything Happens to Me,” “Easy Living,” “Left Alone,” “I Only Have Eyes for You.”

Joni Mitchell sneaks in with a vocal highlight:

“Chinese Cafe,” with its refrain, Nothing lasts for long.

And Shepp returns for the finale: “Stomping at the Savoy.”

The best mix ever made?
Right now I think so.