YAMAHA GRAND MAKES ITS DEBUT
AT ALGONQUIN’S RENOWNED OAK ROOM

BUENA PARK, CA (March 14, 2003)—It's one of the indispensable New York locations. In a guest room there, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe wrote My Fair Lady. It's where Harold Ross came up with the idea for The New Yorker, and guests still receive a complimentary copy. And of course, the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street played home to the Round Table, where writers like Dorothy Parker, James Thurber and Robert Benchley mixed lunch, libations and literary wit in the 1920s.

Connoisseurs of New York cabaret can enjoy the unmatched piano sound of Yamaha in the same room where Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley used to trade bons mots.

Now, in celebration of a dual centennial—Yamaha grand pianos and the Algonquin both made their debuts, on opposite sides of the globe, in 1902—a Yamaha S6 Concert Collection grand piano graces the hotel's sumptuous Oak Room, which was the original location of the Round Table and today hosts one of the city's most celebrated cabarets.

"It's an excellent opportunity for the Algonquin to be associated with a company as fine Yamaha," says the Algonquin's Rahul Suri. "We're celebrating our history and their history at the same time."

Following an autumn run by jazz vocalist Paula West accompanied by pianist Eric Reed, the Oak Room's welcomed Andrea Marcovicci presenting "So In Love: The Songs of Cole Porter," jazz vocalist and saxophonist Curtis Stigers, and jazz pianist and vocalist Peter Cincotti.

Cabaret first came to the Oak Room in 1939, when Algonquin owner Frank Case offered his exclusive clientele "no cover charge, a $1.00 minimum and 65 cents a drink, whether the drink was champagne or club soda." Through the doors came people like Melvyn Douglas, Clifton Webb, George S. Kaufman, Oscar Levant, Jimmy Cagney, Gene Tunney, Marian Anderson, Tallulah Bankhead, Margaret Sullivan, Katherine Hepburn, Hedy Lamarr, Diana Barrymore, Walter Huston and Greta Garbo.

In the early 1980s, the cabaret tradition was restored, and since then the Oak Room has welcomed—and, in some cases, helped to launch the careers of—talents such as Michael Feinstein, Harry Connick, Jr., Diana Krall, Bill Charlap, Mulgrew Miller, Billy Stritch, Jeff Harner, Larry Woodard, Steve Ross, John Pizzarelli, Mary Cleere Haran, Jane Monheit and Stacey Kent.

The hotel places regular Sunday advertisements in the New York Times, which will call attention to the partnership with Yamaha during the year when the piano is in place there.

For more information about Yamaha pianos, write Yamaha Corporation of America, Piano Division, P.O. Box 6600, Buena Park, CA 90622-6600; email infostation@yamaha.com; visit www.yamaha.com or telephone (714) 522-9011.