It’s rare you’ll encounter someone with as much gusto as Storm Large. The Massachusetts-born, Portland, Ore.-based maven currently performs with her band, Le Bonheur. They present a grand deconstructionist survey of the Great American Songbook. Hopping from standards such as Rodgers and Hart’s “The Lady Is a Tramp” to rock classics like Lou Reed’s “Satellite of Love,” Large, 49, serves up a sumptuous smorgasbord of pop panache.
She’s also been one of the lead vocalists of cosmopolitan, multilingual jazz-pop ensemble Pink Martini since 2011, when cofounder and front person China Forbes underwent vocal chord surgery and was temporarily unable to perform. In a 2018 conversation between the two singers for Portland’s Artslandia, Forbes referred to Large as a “Broadway Courtney Love.”
That’s likely because of Large’s extensive background in hard-rock music and her profane, confrontational disposition. The artist chronicles years of hard living in her memoir, Crazy Enough, which she adapted from her 2008 one-woman cabaret of the same name. During Large’s childhood, her mother was institutionalized on and off while struggling with schizophrenia. For years, Large lived her life in reaction to the possibility that she might suffer the same fate.
In conversation, Large is hilarious, off the cuff, vulgar AF and totally genuine. And she has an anecdote for everything. Expect to hear some when she performs on Saturday, March 9, at the Flynn MainStage in Burlington.
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