Little Orchestra, Big Sound | The dozen members of Portland's Pink Martini don't take much time off from traipsing around the globe.
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Pink Martini’s Brian Laverne Davis is trimming roses like a content suburban homeowner, and he’s enjoying every moment of it.
With just three weeks off from touring this year, it’s not often that the percussionist gets to relax in the comfort of his Portland home, so even the lowly tasks of household upkeep make for pleasant, even exotic diversion. Pink Martini—the 12-piece “little orchestra”—just finished a four-night stint at a local fundraiser, and now they’re taking advantage of what little downtime they can grab before gearing up for a series of summer festival stints in Canada—one which will see them headlining the Edmonton International Jazz Festival next week at the Winspear.
“Even when we do get a few days off, there’s usually something that keeps us from just heading for home,” ruefully explains Davis, who also heads the Lions of Batucada, a Portland-based Brazilian dance and percussion ensemble. “Like [fellow Pink Martini percussionist] Derek [Reith] often goes straight to Carnival in Brazil.”
In their 14 years together, Pink Martini has played the Cannes Film Festival, innumerable gigs with national and international symphonies, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, the Albert Hall—hell, they’ve even played at a celebration for none other than soul guru Al Green.
Sounds just terrible, doesn’t it? Touring a worldbeat cocktail lounge band through various sophisticated locales and then skipping a few weeks back home in order to check out music in South America—who would want that?
Obviously, Davis isn’t complaining. Founded in 1994 by classically trained pianist and Harvard graduate Thomas Lauderdale, Pink Martini has gone far beyond its initial incarnation as a fundraising band for West Coast causes, and have moved on to become hitmakers in France (with “Je Ne Veux Pas Travailler,” from their first album, Sympathetique, in 1997), an in-demand touring ensemble, and even the house band for last year’s Academy Awards. That they’ve done all this while cooking up a version of lounge and swing music which deftly (and even impishly) borrows from various world music traditions is impressive; the melting pot of influences never sounds facile.
From French chanson to Italian folk songs, Brazilian samba sways inexorably into American music hall tradition, and every moment sounds as natural as if it were always meant to fit together.
“Well, we respect the traditions that we’re taking from,” Davis explains. “The members of the band are all very well-versed in music, and it’s a very high level of musicianship. We’re not just being dilettantes. It’s kind of like what Peter Gabriel has done with that label of his [Real World]—the point is that if a Brazilian musician comes up and asks us what we’re doing in a particular song, we can say that we’re using a bossa nova beat over top of another musical form; we’re aware of where it comes from.”
They’re also aware of the political implications of their polyglot vocal stylings and musical wanderings—as devout Portlanders (until recently vocalist China Forbes was the last Pink Martini member to hold out on moving there) they hold a leftist, cosmopolitan view that’s sometimes at odds with a certain percentage of their countrymen.
“Because we have so many demonstrations here, George Bush used to call Portland ‘Little Beirut,’” Davis laughs. “So, of course, we had to have a song [Hey Eugene’s “Bukra wba’do”] where China sang in Arabic.”
