Ladi Geisler

German guitarist, bass player, and all-round musician Ladi Geisler has anonymously contributed to thousands of popular studio recordings and hundreds of world-wide Top Ten hits, quietly becoming one of the most versatile instrumentalists of the post-war German music scene and an approachable legend in his own country. Miloslav Ladislav Geisler was born in November 1927 in Prague, son of the director of an electrical company, who had ambitions for his son to join him in that profession. His father paid for violin lessons, and young Ladi proved to be a quick student; he began teaching himself trumpet as well; but fate and Adolf Hitler intervened. He became a German in 1938, when Hitler annexed the Sudetenland, and then, in 1943 the Nazis, desperate for combat troops, drafted the 15-year-old boy into the Luftwaffe, where he was trained to fly the first combat jet fighter, the Messerschmidt 262. He was spared a certain death (the casualty rate by then was almost 100-percent for young Luftwaffe pilots) when he was captured by the British before completing his flight training, and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Denmark. A young autodidact, while in prison he was given an acoustic guitar and brief lessons by another prisoner, and he took to the instrument immediately with great zeal. Multi-talented pianist Horst Wende, eight years Geisler's senior, was in the same camp, and, recognizing the young man's talent, he took young Ladi under his tutelage, teaching him some traditional German lieder and American jazz standards. Around this time Geisler first heard Nat King Cole's guitarist Oscar Moore playing electric guitar, and, totally infatuated with the new sounds, studied electronics, modified a guitar, and built his own amplifier. Electric guitar (and later, electric bass)...