Pink Martini is an American group of twelve Portland musicians characterized by a musical style mixing retro influences, jazz, Latin music, lounge, classical, as well as by texts sung in English, Spanish, French, Italian Portuguese, Japanese, Persian and even Arabic, Hebrew, Neapolitan, Croatian, Mandarin, Romanian, Modern Greek, Armenian, Turkish and German.
Formed in 1994, the band performs in concert around the world during its first three years of existence. Their first album (Sympathique) was released in 1997 and obtained a double gold album in France, where their single Sympathique was used during an advertising campaign. With this success, the group continues to give concerts around the world; the second album, Hang on Little Tomato, after being repeatedly postponed, dates from October 2004.
Many of the group's musicians have French as their mother tongue, or speak French perfectly. One of China's two grandmothers was French and China learned French from childhood, Thomas Lauderdale learned French as part of his university studies of literature and history, Jonas Tauber (one of the contrabassists) is Swiss, and Claude Giron (one of the cellists) is French.
In 2017, the band performs at Jazzablanca in Morocco>.
