Fans can’t get enough of Pink Martini. Will they be the toast of Lexington again?

The story goes that in the fall of 1994, Thomas Lauderdale — a pianist with an eye toward politics and an ear toward music — found himself the very impromptu show opener at a Portland, Ore., fundraiser featuring the campy cover trio known as the Del Rubio Triplets. He hit the stage with a bassist, a bongoist, a singer and a Betsey Johnson dress. Pink Martini had just entered the room.

“There is no way that I could have imagined that the band would still be going 30 years after I first threw on a cocktail dress as the opening act for a political fundraiser. I always thought that I would go into local politics and even run for mayor, and here I am traveling the world with Pink Martini three decades later.”

Through the years, Pink Martini has become a pop group of unclassifiable stylistic definition. Their sound is lavish and elegant, but also loves to globetrot. Its 1997 debut single, “Sympathique” became an award-winning hit in France while subsequent projects would team them with Japanese singer Saori Yuki, the original cast of “Sesame Street” and the Von Trapps (yes, “The Sound of Music” inspiration Von Trapps.)

With elements echoing Latin, classical and jazz that could have been pulled from various points during the past century — multi-lingual hints of salsa, bossa nova, tango and accents from Europe, the Middle East and Asia — Pink Martini was pure pop exotica. But there was nothing kitsch about its performances or recordings. For all the fun it summoned, this self-described “small orchestra” was serious business.

“We have just finished playing with two wonderful symphonies on this current tour, with the OKC Phil (Oklahoma City Philharmonic) and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra,” Lauderdale said. “We owe a lot of the growth of the band’s touring career success to those collaborations with symphonies. As far as collaborating with other artists, I love that too. We have toured and recorded albums with the Von Trapps (“Dream a Little Dream” in 2014), the amazing Australian ‘kamikaze cabaret artist’ and Weimar jazz singer Meow Meow (“Hotel Amour,” 2019) and in 2023 I finished up a collaboration project with the iconic Portland surf rock band Satan’s Pilgrims that was almost 30 years in the making (“Thomas Lauderdale Meets the Pilgrims,” 2023.) “I am currently working on an album with the Iranian superstar, Googoosh.”

While Lauderdale remains at the helm of Pink Martini, its music is co-piloted by two vocalists who alternate performances and recordings with the band — China Forbes and Storm Large. Singers with the audience approachability of a cabaret artist and the versatile vocal gusto that shifts from chanteuse-level intimacy to near operatic intensity, the two are tasked with being the most visible component within Pink Martini’s expansive pop collage.

Forbes, who co-founded Pink Martini with Lauderdale, will perform with the ensemble this weekend at the Lexington Opera House, although Large has sung locally both with the band and on her own.

“I feel incredibly lucky that Pink Martini has not one, but two amazing lead singers that can bring forth the music and vision of this band and captivate audiences,” Lauderdale said. “And they’re two such wildly different women that both do an incredible job with our repertoire and are so engaging with the audience.

“China Forbes is the original lead singer and has been with Pink Martini for almost the entire 30 years of the band. We have been friends for over 35 years, having gone to college together. I lured her out to Portland from NYC in 1995 when I realized Pink Martini needed a real lead singer. She thought it was going to be temporary, but it stuck. Clearly, it has worked out. At this point we are almost like siblings.

“We also have Storm Large, who we are so lucky to have found when China needed to take a very last-minute break for emergency vocal cord surgery in 2011. Storm learned 10 songs in five languages in four days before a run of sold out shows at the Kennedy Center — you know, that esteemed institution and national treasure that belongs to ‘all’ Americans? Storm did an amazing job filling in those shows and has toured off and on with the band and appeared on every recording since then. Both women have such amazing voices, but also stage presence and command of the audience. In totally different ways, both work.”

So how does a large ensemble devoted to pop music of traditional yet unconventional and certainly unexpected tradition stay afloat for 30 years? Credit the credibility of such an enterprise to independence. For its entire three-decade run, Pink Martini has shied away from major labels to release recordings on its own Heinz Records, a label named in tribute to Lauderdale’s dog.

“Being independent and being able to do our own thing artistically at our own pace has always been important to me. Period. When I first formed Heinz Records, the music industry was in a very different place. I really was trying to keep control of what, at that time, was quite a lot of money made from CDs, as well as the artistic and creative control. Now the industry is completely different and artists make hardly any money from physical albums because people don’t really buy them, and streaming pays so little to the musicians. But it’s still important to me and to our band that we are an independent record label and able to put out the kind of work that we want to.”

Pink Martini

When: March 16 at 7:30 p.m.

Where: Lexington Opera House, 401 W. Short

Tickets: $44.50-$74.50 through ticketmaster.com.