Celebrating
‘City
of
Roses’
BLACK
HISTORY
MONTH
Volume XLVII • Number 8
Established in 1970
www.portlandobserver.com
Wednesday • February 21, 2018
Committed to Cultural Diversity
The soulful voice of Kathleen Saadat is captured in
‘Love for Sale’ a new debut album of jazz classics with
Thomas Lauderdale and Pink Martini.
Longtime Portland civil rights leader Kathleen
Saadat (left) gets some love from Portland singer
Storm Large and the band Pink Martini. Saadat
collaborated with Pink Martini founder Thomas
Lauderdale and members of the renowned
Portland jazz band to produce ‘Love for Sale,’ a
debut album of jazz standards. The cd is celebrat-
ed on March 1 when an album release party takes
place at the Aladdin Theater in southeast Portland.
Music and Activism Intersect
Civil rights leader fronts
new CD with Pink Martini
by D anny P eterson
t he P ortlanD o bserver
Longtime Portland civil rights leader Kathleen Saadat
has a hidden musical talent that the rest of the city is about
to experience. A respected and admired advocate for Af-
rican American, women, and gay and lesbian rights since
the 1970s, Saadat has a debut album of jazz classics “Love
for Sale’ coming out on March 1. The recordings were
made with long time friend, Thomas Lauderdale, founder
of the internationally renowned Portland jazz band Pink
Martini.
The two serendipitously met back in the summer of
1991 when Lauderdale got a job working at City Hall
between his junior and senior years in college and was
Photo by K. K enDall
Kathleen Saadat attacks social and economic inequal-
ity during an Occupy movement rally, downtown.
supervised by Saadat who was an assistant to the office of
former City Commissioner Gretchen Kafoury.
Before forming his multi-million record selling group,
Lauderdale, who was born in Oakland Calif., was on track
to a budding political career as a Grant High School stu-
dent in Portland and later as a Harvard student in his early
20s.
“I guess the thing I remember first about Thomas was
his enthusiasm and his sense of humor and great spirit.
And I liked him immediately,” Saadat remembered.
The city office was in the midst of drafting a civil rights
ordinance to prohibit housing discrimination against gay
and lesbian people and to protect families and individu-
als denied housing based on legal sources of income like
housing assistance, a first of its kind for the city.
Lauderdale was learning to build coalitions in support
C ontinueD on P age 7