Featuring a dozen musicians and two out-there singers – China Forbes and Storm Large – Pink Martini needs to be seen to be believed.
Founded by Renaissance man and Portland, Oregon, political activist Thomas Lauderdale, the postmodern human jukebox plays in multiple styles and languages with a retro sound stamp.
Their music crosses genres and ranges from 1950s-60s pop, jazz, cocktail, Latin and classical, and in several languages, including English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and Hebrew.
“It’s more interesting for the audience and certainly more interesting for the musicians to be playing such a diverse range of material in both style and language.”
Thomas Lauderdale
“It’s more interesting for the audience and certainly more interesting for the musicians to be playing such a diverse range of material in both style and language,” Lauderdale told The Jerusalem Post, in 2019, before the group’s first visit to Israel.
Audiences will get a chance to see what all the hoopla is about when Pink Martini returns to Israel next week for a show at Hangar 11 in Tel Aviv, on July 18.
From debut till now
Pink Martini first performed in Europe at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival and its orchestral debut with the Oregon Symphony, in 1998. Since then, the band has continued to play with over 70 orchestras around the world, including multiple collaborations with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, the Boston Pops, the San Francisco Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra and the BBC Concert Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall.
In 2014, their eighth album Dream A little Dream Of Me was released, which included a cover in Hebrew of the song “The Most Beautiful Girl in the Kindergarten” and a collaboration with the band The Von Trapps (descendants of the family on which the musical and film The Sound of Music is based).
In 2016, the ninth studio album Je dis oui! was released, boasting 15 songs in eight languages, and included collaborations with Rufus Wainwright.
Lauderdale, who grew up in California, told The Jerusalem Post that he modeled his shows after the kind of parties he wanted to attend as a kid – a nod to Breakfast at Tiffany’s and La Dolce Vita.
Not a bad jumping off point.
www.leaan.co.il or *8780.
