Wax of the Week #92...Bert Kaempfert and His Orchestra: Bert Kaempfert Now! (1971)

Kaempfert, born in Hamburg in 1923, was a songwriter (“Strangers in the Night”) and bandleader whose most famous footnote is probably (while working A&R for Polydor) hiring The Beatles to back English singer Tony Sheridan in 1961. He started releasing LPs in the late ’50s, and some of his material starting a decade later falls nicely into the Now Sound genre (middle-aged, mostly white orchestra leaders covering “hip” rock and pop sounds of the day), with a plucking electric bass underpinning pleasant brass melodies. He died in 1980. The label on this one brags “Recorded in Europe.”