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Come, join me at one of the great rooms for cocktail piano. We're in New York. Outside, it's a nippy September. Inside, we're having dinner at the Rainbow Room high atop Rockefeller Center, overlooking the city. We're dressed to the nines. From our window table, we enjoy a view sweeping all the way down Manhattan Island past the Empire State Building and on as far south as the Battery. We see the East River with ships tied alongside docks, waiting to sail off to ports of call we can only imagine. Far below us, the dazzling lights are so bright they create an almost blinding aura—that's Broadway!—theatergoers rush to make the curtain.
By contrast, around us the atmosphere is intimate. Lights lowered just enough leave a sparkle on the wine glasses. Waiters, in anonymity, move silently among the tables. Now, our wine has just been poured. Across the room, a pianist plays a gorgeous rendition of "Laura." Several diners are already on the dance floor. We savor the whole scene. We think about the city in all its complexity and diversity, its resources - theaters and museums, the bright and talented people who live and work here. The city that fuels a million dreams. And realities of all kinds. Downtown—Wall Street, the financial capital of the world. Fifth Avenue—The finest of stores—Saks, Bloomingdales, Harry Winston, to mention a few. New York—the city of Gershwin, Cole Porter, Walt Whitman. Our senses are heightened. The music—enchantingly, softly—intrudes itself into our consciousness, somehow underscoring everything, giving added import to all we see and think about, and feel. We're in New York City, vibrantly alive and as one with the sound of Cocktail Piano.
— Jim Haskins
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