Performance Year:
Formed by pianist Thomas Lauderdale, Pink Martini celebrated its 30th anniversary from July 2024 to July 2025. The group has built an international fan base with its rollicking cross-genre mix of classical, cabaret, jazz and easy-listening pop. Before founding the band, Lauderdale had political ambitions and was dismayed by the inappropriately loud and potentially off-putting nature of the music he heard at fundraisers and public events around his hometown. He decided to focus on an ensemble that could provide music for events that supported causes near and dear to his heart, including affordable housing, civil rights, education, public libraries, and parks. He enlisted his former Harvard classmate China Forbes, a powerhouse vocalist and songwriter, to join him in the endeavor.
From the start, Pink Martini was a sensation. The first song that Lauderdale and Forbes wrote together, “Sympathique” (Je ne veus pas travailler), became an overnight sensation in France and was nominated for Song of the Year at France’s Victoires de la Musique Awards. To this day, “Je ne veux pas travailler” or “I don’t want to work” remains a mantra for striking French workers. Since its first full-length album Sympathique (1997), the band has released 11 wildly diverse and eclectic albums on its own Heinz Records, selling over 3 million records worldwide.
Featuring a dozen musicians with songs in 25 languages, Pink Martini performs its multilingual repertoire on concert stages and with symphony orchestras throughout Europe, Asia, Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, Northern Africa, Australia, New Zealand, South America, and North America. Pink Martini made its European debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997 and its orchestral debut with the Oregon Symphony in 1998 under the direction of Norman Leyden. Since then, the band has gone on to play with more than 70 orchestras around the world, including multiple engagements with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, the Boston Pops, the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center, the San Francisco Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Sydney Symphony at the Sydney Opera House, and the BBC Concert Orchestra at Royal Albert Hall in London.
Masters of collaboration, Pink Martini members display a wide diversity of musical influences and are virtuosic enough to tackle any genre with total command. A partial list of collaborators consists of comic Phyllis Diller, jazz vocalists Michael Feinstein and Jimmy Scott, Vegas crooner Wayne Newton, trumpeter Doc Severinsen, Hollywood cult figure Mamie Van Doren, singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, vocal ensemble the Von Trapps, composer-pianist Michel Legrand, Aussie “gigastar” Dame Edna Everage, Irish folk-pop group the Chieftains, Japanese singer Saori Yuki, the original cast of “Sesame Street,” Latin-music legend Chavela Vargas, and Broadway icon Carol Channing.
