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Vol. 14: 6 Plus 6

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  1. Never My Love
  2. Dino´s Melody
  3. My Way
  4. Petula´s Song
  5. A Tune For Tony
  6. At The Rainbow´s End
  7. Stoney End
  8. A Song For Satch
  9. Theme From ´Shaft´
  10. All I Ever Need Is You
  11. Melancholy Serenade
  12. Tom´s Tune
About this album: 

Produced by Milt Gabler
Engineer: Peter Klemt

Compact Disc availability: 

Polydor 529 168-2 (deleted)

Liner Notes: 

The “BERT KAEMPFERT COLLECTION”

During 25 years of cooperation with POLYDOR, Bert Kaempfert arranged, composed and produced a countless number of songs. From 1961 until shortly before his death in 1980, close to 40 LP productions with and by Bert Kaempfert and his Orchestra were released in Germany alone under the Polydor label.

These albums contain more than 460 productions of his own beautiful compositions together with evergreens and world standards.

Polydor considers it a duty to re-release in loose order the more popular albums of this exceptional composer and bandleader with the original tracklistings. At the same time, the facilities of the modern digital technology are of benefit to reproduce the original recordings.

6 PLUS 6

The present album 6 PLUS 6 was published in 1972 and recorded as usual with engineer Peter Klemt in Hamburg. The soloists were Ack Van Rooyen (trumpet and flugelhorn) and Herb Geller (alto saxophone and alto flute).

For this very special album, Bert Kaempfert had selected six unforgettable tunes that were hits for six top artists: Never My Love (The Fifth Dimension), My Way (Frank Sinatra), Stoney End (Barbra Streisand), Theme From “Shaft” (Isaac Hayes), All I Ever Need Is You (Sonny And Cher) and Melancholy Serenade (Jackie Gleason).

Together with his friend Herbert Rehbein, Bert Kaempfert composed six new songs in tribute to Dean Martin, Petula Clark, Tony Bennett, Judy Garland, Louis Armstrong and Tom Jones: Dino’s Melody, Petula’s Song, A Tune For Tony, At The Rainbow’s End, A Song For Satch and Tom’s Tune.

There are only very few composers who can express their admiration for another artist’s work as generously and as personally as Bert Kaempfert and Herbert Rehbein have done in these melodies.

While the tunes will last forever the titles may well be temporary. Should Tony, Petula, Dino, Tom, or anyone else wish to record these songs, lyrics could be written and the titles changed. Bert Kaempfert was used to such changes. In 1967, he found himself with so many original compositions that he introduced a numbering system. Song “No. 1” became Lonely Is The Name, a hit for Sammy Davis, Jr.

Even titles which had already been published were renamed; for example, Al Martino’s hit Spanish Eyes was originally Moon Over Naples and an instrumental released on Decca, Strangers In the Night, a great comeback for Frank Sinatra, was written by Bert Kaempfert for a Universal picture called “A Man Could Get Killed” – the original title was Beddy-Bye. And Wayne Newton’s Danke Schoen was a Kaempfert instrumental entitled Candlelight Café.

Whatever the titles of the compositions may be, the melodies remain “typically Kaempfert” – uniquely beautiful. They are enriching each artist’s repertoire. And again and again the greatest pleasure is listening to Bert Kaempfert’s sonorous interpretations of his own compositions and those of other famous composers – it was said that Isaac Hayes preferred Bert Kaempfert’s version of Theme From “Shaft” even to his own!