Berthold Heinrich Kampft would have been 100 years old last October. A welcome opportunity to remember an artist who recruited a few talented boys from Liverpool as a backing band for Tony Sheridan and produced their joint single in Hamburg for his mother label Polydor; to the man who had the first number one hit by a German in the USA with “Wonderland By Night” and who once flirtatiously said that he “would like to make music that doesn’t bother you”.
Decca was responsible for the distribution of his records overseas, which were released there under sometimes varying titles and in occasionally different compilations. 23 of these studio albums, starting with “April in Portugal” (1959) and closing with “The Kaempfert Touch” released in 1970, are now collected here for the first time, expanded to include plenty of bonus tracks and “Pete Fountain Plays Bert Kaempfert” as a CD premiere.
An accurate observer of the local market
While LPs like “That Happy Feeling”, “Afrikaan Beat And Other Favorites” and “Strangers In The Night” regularly occupied the charts in the USA at that time, at home they were mostly overshadowed by the works of the other great bandleader and arranger, James Last. This was by no means due to the smaller number of shopping malls and elevators in this country. Recorded by luminaries such as Herb Geller, Peter Herbolzheimer and Ladi Geisler with his “crunchy bass”, Kaempfert’s flawless productions, which were trained on Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, were based more on American listening habits from the outset.
And his through-ball assists for Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Nat King Cole proved him to be an accurate observer of the local market. The question of who actually needs this 24-CD box remains irrelevant in view of an extremely successful and long overdue tribute to this almost forgotten master of sophisticated entertainment.