Bert Kaempfert

Bert Kaempfert had almost too much talent, ability, and good luck rolled into one career to be fully appreciated, even by his own chosen audience, the lovers of fine orchestral pop music. He was one of the most successful conductors, arrangers, and recording artists in the latter field, but was also a major producer and played a key (if indirect) role in the roots of the British beat boom of the early '60s, which evolved into the British Invasion of America in 1964. Berthold Kaempfert was born in Barmbek, a working-class section of Hamburg, Germany, in 1923. He was musically inclined as a boy, and found that interest indulged by an act of fate when he was six years old -- Kaempfert was injured in a car accident and his mother used the money from the settlement to buy him a piano. He became proficient at the keyboard, and also on the clarinet and saxophone, among other instruments. He studied at the Hamburg Conservatory and although he was interested in all facets of music, Kaempfert was particularly taken with American-style big-band music of the late '30s and early '40s -- his multi-instrumental skills made him a potentially valuable commodity, and he was recruited into a pop orchestra run by Hans Bussch while in his teens, but was later drafted and served as a bandsman in the German navy, before being captured and interned as an Allied prisoner. He founded a band of his own and later toured American military installations in Germany, at last able to play his favorite kind of music. Returning to his native Hamburg, he began performing on British Forces Network radio and writing compositions, initially using the alias of Mark Bones. Kaempfert's reputation in Hamburg attracted the attention of Polydor Records, which hired him as an arranger, producer, and music director...