Tea at the Waldorf, Vol, 1 (LHS)

“Once you play the standards, you will always work.   That’s what a fellow “pit” musician told me concerning the spell of unemployment that came my way in the mid-80’s with the invention of the synthesizer.  No one “needed a harp” in a Broadway orchestra any longer.  The count was down to only two harp chairs on the “Boulevard Of Broken Dreams.”  I was out of a steady job for nearly a year and a half.  I listened to my friend’s advice.  I learned to play the standards.

Each day, in the vast amount of free time that I was forced to admit was my life, I wrote a new arrangement.  I held myself to the most recognizable composers, lyricists and melodies: Rodgers and Hammerstein, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and the Gershwins…The telephone rang one day.  Bobby Brenner representing The Peter Duchin Orchestra and The Waldorf=Astoria called to say there was an opening for a solo harpist two days a week at tea time…Would I like to audition?  It is now ten years later.  Life on Park Avenue has been a constant part of my experience…

This collection is made up of ten arrangements ready for sight-reading and performance…They are given a very direct treatment. Almost every arrangement has a notation for a “swing” feeling.  If you are not tapping your toes and snapping your fingers when you think of the tune, you are missing the point..” Ray Pool New York City, May 15, 1996

Download and read the first page of music

Listen to a MIDI audio sample: