Stirring, not shaken, Pink Martini returns to Monterey with new music, old favorites.

Aga Popęda here, with an invitation to sophistication. 

With the charisma of James Bond and Pink Panther combined, Pink Martini is back in Monterey. The band will perform at 8pm, Wednesday, March 30 at Golden State Theatre; tickets are $60-$100. Its lead vocalist China Forbes shared with the Weekly that the Monterey audience is exactly her kind of people. “A sophisticated, mature audience,” she says.

Pink Martini has been coming back again and again to Monterey since its inception in 1994. “Not only each location, even each venue influences the performance,” Forbes says a few days before their Monterey concert. “For example, if the audience is standing, they can dance. And you have a very different energy from the crowd.”

The band branched out of politics, as its leader, Forbes’ buddy from college and pianist Thomas Lauderdale, often says. Lauderdale was planning to run for mayor of Portland, but there was a distraction. The conservative group Oregon Citizens Alliance declared war on homosexuality, attempting to get a state measure approved in 1994 that would allow discrimination. The band was initially part of his campaign pushing against the measure. Lauderdale once described the group as a house band of the United Nations circa 1962, full of progressive ideas from that era.

Famously, the band covers sensual songs from foreign movies, alternating between vocalists—Forbes and Storm Large—and genres, from classical to traditional pop, Latin and jazz. They sing in 25 languages, including such bold choices as Armenian or Xhosa (native to South Africa and Zimbabwe). The format turned out to be a recipe for success both domestically and internationally, allowing the band to travel and delight the world. Sometimes they function pretty much like a little orchestra, sometimes with as many as a dozen members performing on stage at the same time. 

Singing in foreign languages is challenging, Forbes says. “Arabic, Thai and Russian,” she lists as her biggest challenges in terms of pronunciation. Easy languages are French, Italian and Spanish, the languages she happened to study. 

Among songs she is excited to perform on the 2022 tour, Forbes mentioned “Hey Eugene” (written by her in 2007 and released on the album with the same title the same year). It’s still one of their biggest crowd pleasers. Another song she loves to perform is “Amado Mio” from the classic 1946 film noir Gilda, originally lip-synched by Rita Hayworth. Finally, Pink Martini will surely perform its newest addition to their repertoire, “Full Circle"—a song written by Forbes last summer when still fresh from the emotions of the pandemic. 

It was Forbes’ idea from the beginning to write their own songs in addition to covers, in order to give the band writing credibility. That’s how they wrote their biggest hit “Sympathique” (1997, the first album) and suddenly became an American band singing in French that became a hit in France. That was exactly the moment Pink Martini knew they discovered a perfect and unique concoction.

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Seeing Pink. Oysters on the shell. Spring rolls and wine. Serious cocktails at Montrio.