Horst Wende

Horst Wende made music through seven decades of the 20th century, recording over 100 easy listening albums as producer, bandleader, conductor, arranger, and musician. Today many of his records, released under his own name or his longtime alias of Roberto Delgado, are sought and coveted by collectors of the German big band movement of the '70s. Horst Wende was born into a musical family in Saxony, Germany, in 1919, and was skilled enough that by six years old he as able to regularly guest on accordion in his grandfather's band at a local restaurant. Young Wende played and studied music constantly; by his fifteenth birthday he was already accomplished at playing piano, accordion, and xylophone, and he was accepted into the prestigious Leipzig Conservatory of Music. His music studies there were interrupted by World War II; conscripted into the Germany army, he was captured by British troops and incarcerated in a POW camp in Denmark in 1942. There he met a young trumpet player, Ladi Geisler, who had just been given a guitar by a fellow prisoner and was determined to learn that instrument (Geisler became the greatest session guitarist in the German music industry, playing on thousands of recordings and continuing to release his own material even now). On their release after the end of the war, Geisler and Wende relocated to the city of Hamburg, where they formed a trio playing small clubs in the same neighborhood that would later launch the Beatles. Wende started getting recording work as a session musician, then became a member of the Norddeutscher Rundfunk Big Band (North German Radio Big Band, aka NDR) with included such bandmates as Bert Kaempfert, James Last, and Geisler. The Horst Wende trio grew in popularity, becoming a major attraction on the American military base...