Rhapsody in Pink

How long has Thomas Lauderdale been sitting at his piano? Since returning from a walk with his dog, Heinz (the namesake of Lauderdale's record label), the leader of the Oregon group Pink Martinihas spent the past forty minutes talking about making enemies, making money and making a follow-up to 1997's dazzling Sympathique. Except for one woof from Heinz, Lauderdale's rapid but gentle speech has been the only sound on his end of the phone. But when the conversation turns to George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" -- Lauderdale calls it "the greatest American piece" -- he wedges the receiver between his ear and shoulder and suddenly sends a flurry of notes through the line from his loft in downtown Portland.

"I think the Leonard Bernstein 'Rhapsody' is the best. He does something no other pianist does," Lauderdale says just before attacking his piano to demonstrate the kaleidoscopic "Mysterioso" solo before the work's coda. "For years, I played it and never really got it. I sort of separated the hands, like this" -- he plays again just as fast, his left hand working further down the keyboard. "There's a sort of melody that exists, which I never knew until last year. He does it by not separating the hands."

Aside from brief dalliances with the violin, the clarinet and politics, Lauderdale, 32, has concentrated on the piano since he was 6 years old. He first learned Gershwin's most famous composition when he was thirteen. The next time he plays it publicly will be with the Kansas City Symphony this Friday and Saturday, two of the half-dozen or so concerts this year to which Pink Martini will add an orchestral twist.

"When we first started doing stuff with orchestras, it was sort of amateurish," Lauderdale says. "It was the classic sort of boring orchestrations that symphony musicians really hate because they're just sort of whole notes and padding. Orchestras have a history of hating pop programs because they're not interesting for the individual players. The challenge has been to make the arrangements elegant and substantial."

Elegance isn't something Pink Martini lacks -- most of its members are classically trained and professionally accomplished. But the group's sophistication never seems prim or studied, and its lounge vibe hardly comes across as a lunge for the cocktail shaker. Rather than distill a few Latin beats and Continental piano runs into a hip flask, Lauderdale and company siphon melodies, harmonies and instruments from Cuba, France, Spain, Japan, Greece and Broadway. It's saucy, it swings, but it's not some facile bunny-hop soundtrack.

"The music itself is cinematic," Lauderdale says. "I'm influenced by the aesthetic of Hollywood in the '40s." He cites the music from the 1946 Rita Hayworth-in-South America film noir Gilda as "the epitome of that sound." Lauderdale also admires the work of the late film composer Bernard Herrmann, particularly his score for the 1945 mad-musician thriller Hangover Square, which in turn owes much of its sensibility to the black-tie romanticism of early-twentieth-century music.

On disc, Pink Martini's night-in-the-tropics version of Ravel's "Bolero" pumps new blood into the instantly recognizable classical hard-on. The twelve-piece lineup on Sympathique fans out from a flickering bass, a love-drunk cello and trade-wind percussion, seductively understating the melody and supplanting the usual arrangement's hedonistic sweep with cravats-and-spats panache. To perform the piece with a symphony, Lauderdale says, the group has restored much of Ravel's original orchestration.

Besides stylish, semiformal interpretations of "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Bolero," Pink Martini will play new material the group has been working on for more than two years. For Sympathique, which has sold about 500,000 copies worldwide, Lauderdale focused on what he calls the "masterpieces" of favorite (and often little-known) composers, such as Manos Hadjidakis, whose Oscar-winning "Never on Sunday" China Forbes sings on the disc -- in Greek. The album's two originals, including the title track (which Forbes, who wrote the lyrics, sings in French), fit neatly alongside "Sunday" and an eerie, music-box reading of "Qué Sera Sera." But the group's sophomore outing, due later this year, will consist mostly of originals.

"It's a huge challenge," Lauderdale says. "The first album, nobody was paying attention, including several of the band members. I had the luxury of working slowly, without any pressure and with no expectation. But I'm not really a songwriter. Writing songs is not something I imagined I'd be doing in a thousand years."

He's not working alone, though. Dividing into what he calls "grouplets," the Pink Martini members are sharing songwriting duties for the next album, and not just among each other.

"We collaborate with friends around the world," Lauderdale says. "There was a Croatian photographer who lived downstairs from me, and we worked on a song for several years. It has an Eastern European sound to it. He would come upstairs, and we'd negotiate from bar to bar as the song revealed itself."

The rest of the upcoming album promises to expand the group's range even further. "We've used a couple of vocal groups, a harpist and a small orchestra," he says. "One song, 'Hang On, Little Tomato,' has Norman Leyden, the associate conductor of the Oregon Symphony, on clarinet. On another song, we worked with a local high school gospel choir."