Pink Martini's China Forbes on the band's 30 years and 30 languages

Pink Martini, the Portland, Oregon, band known for its eclectic blending of jazz, Latin and classical music, is celebrating its 30th anniversary, which caught singer China Forbes off guard.

“It’s so hard to believe. It’s really quite unexpected,” said Forbes, who joined a year after the band’s formation. “I wasn’t really tracking it for a while. And then suddenly the 20th anniversary of the first album happened. And then now it’s already at the 30th anniversary of the band. It’s crazy.”

The group stays on its toes with constantly evolving setlists, with band leader Thomas Lauderdale curating the songs for the band, which features a dozen musicians. Their 30th anniversary tour visits the Carnegie of Homestead Music Hall on Oct. 29.

“We don’t know what the setlist is basically until we walk on stage,” Forbes said. “… It works out well when we decide to take requests, and we’re just a very spontaneous, nimble band because we’ve been doing it for so long that we really can sort of pivot and play almost anything.”

Thankfully there haven’t been any crash-and-burn moments because of the group’s longevity and quick thinking.

”No, because one of my special talents is making it funny anyway, so it usually works out,” Forbes said. “Even if it doesn’t work out, it works out.”

In a call from Portland, as she was preparing to head out on tour, Forbes discussed some of the (30!) different languages used in the band’s songs, new music and her solo career:

Of the 30 languages, what was the hardest home to nail down?

Well, I would say Arabic and Thai. I mean Arabic and Thai have sounds that I have a really hard time making. There’s a couple of sounds, if you don’t grow up making those sounds in your mouth, it’s just really hard to. So I have to sort of do like my version of Arabic and Thai. I would say those are the hardest, And Russian has a couple of sounds like that, too. But my favorites are French and Italian and Spanish.

How many other languages do you actually speak?

I can speak Italian and French. I’m studying French to this day. I’m studying it every day using the Duolingo app because I grew up studying French in school and my grandfather was French. I grew up with him speaking French in our household, and I always thought I would be fluent. Then when we wrote our first song, we wrote it in French and so we became well known in France and over those years I worked on my French more, but I’m still not fluent. So now I’m doing Duolingo every day in the hopes that I will someday miraculously become fluent. I don’t know if that will happen. It will probably happen if I live in France for six months. … I have too much hesitation when I have to speak, so my French is definitely getting better, but it’s not perfect.

Do you feel like the band’s music transcends language, as it seems to be so accepted everywhere?

I think so. I think the fact that the audiences can enjoy the concert so much even though they don’t understand two-thirds of the songs and what we’re actually singing, but the melodies and the exuberance and the percussion and all the instruments and the incredible musicians in the band, and it’s just sort of all delightful, so you kind of forget that you have no idea what we’re saying when we’re singing a song. So yeah I think it does transcend the language, but at the same time all of the different languages create this incredible feeling of worldliness and like we’ve been on a trip and so it works together.

With Pink Martini, is there a new album in the works?

It’s sort of in the works. We’ve done some singles over the years as part of the next album to be, but we haven’t really been working on it because I just put out a solo album and Thomas finished an album with Satan’s Pilgrims, the surf band that he worked with, worked on that for 25 years, and now he’s working on an album with the Iranian singer Googoosh, so there’s so many projects that poor little Pink Martini just hasn’t had a chance to compete, but at some point I hope that we will make another album.

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How does your work with Pink Martini fulfill you creatively versus what you do as a solo artist? (Forbes released her latest solo album, “The Road,” in May.)

I think with Pink Martini, it’s this amazing collaborative experience with so many talented and diverse musicians, so it feels sort of expansive, like the possibilities are endless with how we could approach a song and arrange a song, and that’s really fun. Working with Thomas, he’s so talented at coming up with voicings and his chord progressions that make everything sound so much better than I could do it on my own. So when I write with Thomas, it’s really fun because we both really write lyrics and music together, and we’ve written a lot of songs over the years that I really love, and that’s been fantastic. Then with my solo stuff, it’s like my heart and soul. I’m alone at the piano writing what’s going on in my life and it’s personal. It’s deeply, deeply personal, so it feels very healing and cathartic for me to write about that and completely different from sort of the fantasy of Pink Martini, which is more of a romantic story and my story is more the real story.