When pianist Thomas M. Lauderdale founded the band Pink Martini in 1994, he was in the mood for almost everything - except monochrome uniformity. His cohorts, always a dozen or so in number, already laid down a musical melange on their 1997 debut album "Sympathique" that not only drew its sounds from the 1930s to the late 1950s of the century that was not yet even then, but is now very much gone, but all of whom shone with highly distinctive individualistic talents and performance styles.
And then some of the gems ended up on the "Lounge Compilations" which were very popular at that time, went around the world and could have spoiled the band's reputation. Pink Martini might have been the Yellow Butterflies forever.
The fact that it still didn't come to that is partly due to the relentlessly explorative Lauderdale, dedicated to experimentation, but also because his combo seems to set memorably rare mechanisms in motion. Anyone who has ever experienced Pink Martini on a stage will be a repeat offender at the next opportunity. And then doesn't come alone. If necessary, he keeps good friends from the wedding and persuades their family to come to the concert. In the meantime Lauderdale has expanded the repertoire from Pink Martini to the music of the Here & Now, without disposing of the wonderfully nostalgic of earlier times immediately in the residual waste.
He now goes even further. On the new album "Je Dis Oui!" he not only gathers exquisite musicians in the usual way, in front of which this time again not his "Ur" chanteuse China Forbes, but the equally celebrated Storm Large (her name is really like that!) will lift the lead vocals. And he has, so that he in any case does not have to schedule quiet minutes in his brisk creative work, looked around the world for songs often long gone from us divas. With astonishing success. For example, while the singer Fairuz may hardly be known to anyone in Europe or the US, in Lebanon she is the country's Edith Piaf. Or do you know Googoosh? Well, ask a neighbour from Iran who has passed 60. And what about Amália Rodrigues? Well, to the Portuguese, the singer, who died back in 1999, is still considered the queen of fado.
These are some of the sources Lauderdale has enriched his creation Pink Martini with in the meantime and thus will attract the loyal community to his concerts again. There is no doubt about it, especially not in times when the search for true style and grandeur is almost desperate. Or to put it a bit more true to life: At a Pink Martini concert you think afterwards that you probably only experienced the US election campaign in a bad dream. They couldn't possibly have been one and the same species!?
Even a butterfly can take a wrong turn. And while the rest of the family, the little blue one and the nervous green one, the gallant red one and all the other motley ones fly straight on, he, the dreamy yellow one, accidentally takes the way to the left and lands in a seed box. Henceforth, all onlookers think the whole clan is just so pretty yellow.
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