O.C.'s Pacific Symphony Welcomes PINK MARTINI, 4/8-4/10

Press Release:

Audiences should remember to savor, not gulp, when PINK MARTINI comes to town to perform with Pacific Symphony next month! The Washington Post perhaps put it best: "Pour in a variety of genres, shake well, serve. The crowd loves it." The highly electric and eclectic group draws its musical inspiration from all over the world, effortlessly crossing the categories of pop, jazz and classical to create their own brand of musical fusion. While the Portland, Ore.-based, 12-member ensemble has been making waves for more than a decade with its fresh take on vintage big band sound, blending a multilingual mix of 1940s jazz, global rhythms and more-it appears for the first time with the Symphony, led by Principal Pops Conductor Richard Kaufman, on Thursday-Saturday, April 8-10, at 8 p.m, in the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall. The group is known for songs that range from "Je ne veux pas travailler (I don't want to work)," the Doris Day hit "Que Sera, Sera," "Lets Never Stop Falling in Love" and "Hey, Eugene!"

Band leader Thomas Lauderdale says: "PINK MARTINI is a rollicking around-the-world musical adventure…if the United Nations had a house band in 1962, hopefully we'd be that band."

The first half of the evening's concert features talented harmonica player Bernie Fields as he brings his own brand of musicality to songs such as Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine," Ennio Morricone's haunting "Gabriel's Oboe" from the movie "The Mission," Astor Piazzolla's "Libertango," and more.

"Both China Forbes (PINK MARTINI's lead singer) and I come from multicultural families,"
says Lauderdale. "All of us have studied different languages as well as different styles of music… so inevitably, our repertoire is wildly diverse. At one moment, you feel like you're in the middle of a samba parade in Rio de Janeiro, and in the next moment, you're in a French music hall of the 1930s or a palazzo in Napoli. It's a bit like an urban musical travelogue."

In 1994, Lauderdale founded PINK MARTINI's "little orchestra" in response to what he saw as the "underwhelming, lackluster, loud and un-neighborly," music he found at Portland political fundraisers. Lauderdale met Forbes at Harvard while studying history and literature and she was studying English literature and painting. Three years after graduating, Lauderdale called Forbes, who was living in New York, and asked her to join PINK MARTINI. They began to play gigs all around Oregon, and the rest, as they say, is history. Today, PINK MARTINI's dozen musicians perform on concert stages and with symphony orchestras throughout Europe, Asia, Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, Northern Africa, Australia, New Zealand and North America. The ensemble made its European debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997 and its orchestral debut with the Oregon Symphony in 1998. Since then, the band has gone on to play with countless orchestras around the world.

The ensemble's debut album "Sympathique" was released independently in 1997 on the band's own label, Heinz Records, and quickly became an international phenomenon, garnering the group nominations for "Song of the Year" and "Best New Artist" in France's Victoires de la Musique Awards in 2000. PINK MARTINI released "Hang on Little Tomato" in 2004 and "Hey Eugene!" in 2007. All three albums have gone gold in France, Canada, Greece and Turkey, and have sold more than 2 million copies worldwide. In October 2009, the band released their fourth album, "Splendor in the Grass" and previously that year, they also recorded three concerts with the Oregon Symphony under the direction of Carlos Kalmar for a symphonic record slated for a release this spring.

"Americans don't really sing together anymore…except for church…or maybe the shower," says Lauderdale. "For me, PINK MARTINI is partially an attempt to rebuild a culture which sings and dances. The overarching goal is to create a cohesive body of beautiful songs with beautiful melodies-and then it all just extends outward from there."

Photo courtesy of Heinz Records/Pacific Symphony.

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Pacific Symphony's Pops series is made possible by its official airline, American Airlines; official hotel, The Westin South Coast Plaza; Pops media sponsor, the Los Angeles Times; official Pops radio station, K-Earth 101; and official television station, KOCE-TV.

Tickets are $25-$150; for more information or to purchase tickets, call (714) 755-5799 or visit www.pacificsymphony.org.

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