Autumn de Wilde
Lauderdale wanted classier fundraisers.
Bandleader Thomas Lauderdale launched Pink Martini in 1994 to provide a spiffier soundtrack for political fundraisers. Since then, the Portland, Oregon-based “little orchestra” has captivated audiences across the globe with a spirited, multilingual melange that incorporates elements of pop, jazz, classical and world music. On tour in support of their new album, Je Dis Oui!, Pink Martini visits Overture Center’s Capitol Theater on March 1.
Pink Martini’s roots are in playing at fundraisers for progressive causes and candidates. With your busy touring and recording schedule, do you still make time to play at those kinds of events?
Yes, we do quite a bit of that. I live in a loft building downtown, and we do a lot of political fundraising there. A couple years ago, we did a big rally in Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland in support of the Occupy movement because I felt like a lot of the valid points were being lost in the coverage of “dirty hippies.”
The new album, Je Dis Oui, has an interesting assortment of guest vocalists, a couple of whom had never set foot in a recording studio before. How did that particular batch of singers come together?
The albums reflect my daily life, whoever I’m spending time with, the countries that we’re traveling in. There’s no particular theme. This album has three French songs, which we wrote for French actress Isabelle Huppert to sing in a film called Souvenir. And I thought it was important to do a couple of songs in Arabic, one of which was co-written with a man I met on a plane coming back from Paris. It was sung in Arabic by NPR’s Ari Shapiro, who’s Jewish. So that all just kind of unfolded organically without much of a thought or plan.
Are there differences in how audiences in the U.S. and audiences in other parts of the world respond to your music?
It shifts from country to country. I thought, for example, that Swiss audiences would be stoic, but actually they’re the nuttiest and most demonstrative; there’s nothing neutral about them. I think a lot of Americans come from a sort of puritanical ancestry. It takes a little while to get American audiences whipped up, but eventually they get there.
What can audience members expect at your Madison show?
We’re going to do a mixture from all the albums. Our audiences are generally a wide spectrum of people of different ages, different politics, different languages and different religions, and hopefully, it’ll all culminate in a big conga line at the end.
How often does that happen?
Not enough, but it happens fairly often. If I had my druthers, it would be constant.
