Horst Wende Alias Roberto Delgado

In memory of a great Accordeon Player, Artist, Bandleader, Composer, Producer.
The first time i heard the Delgado sound, i knew that's my kind of music. Music with a warm touchy feeling and rhythm. After a little research i found Roberto Delgado in his home town, Hamburg Germany. Where he lived under his real name Horst Wende.

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Horst Wende made music from the thirties till the eighties in the 20th century, recording over 150 easy listening albums as producer, bandleader, conductor, arranger, & musician.

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. On their release after the end of the war, Geisler (guitar) and Wende (accordion & marimba) relocated to the city of Hamburg, where they formed a trio with Hans Walther (bass) playing small clubs.
Wende started getting recording work as a session musician, then became a member of the Norddeutscher Rundfunk Big Band with included such bandmates as Bert Kaempfert, Hans Last, Ladi Geisler, Fritz Schulz Reichel & Werner Müller. The Horst Wende Quartett (Franz Rasch-Bass, Hans Bekker-Drums, Ladi Geisler-Guitar, Horst Wende-Accordion & marimba) grew in popularity, becoming a major attraction on the American military bases circuit while Horst Wende and His Swinging Accordion Quartett headlined the Salambo & Tarantella nightclubs in Hamburg.

In the fifties Polydor Records snapped up all the budding stars of the swinging local Hamburg music scene, and signing Wende as a staff producer. There Wende produced, arranged, and composed many compositions for James Last, Bert Kaempfert, Max Greger, and others, contributing heavily to the popularity of Schlager. Wende assembled and began producing his own accordion group in the early fifties, releasing folk and pop recordings to considerable success in Germany. Always interested in new sounds, he released several accomplished records exploring world music styles, most notably Africana and Todos Bailan Calypso, which were critically acclaimed but had very limited sales.

Feeling there was an opportunity to sell more records in Germany by giving Wende an exotic alias, Polydor decided to release future world music style records under an alias, giving Wende the Latin-sounding name of Roberto Delgado. Young producer Uwe Bowien was brought in the seventies to add a modern recording sound to Wende's musical ideas, and the result proved to be a gold mine for Polydor, when fans in the U.K. and the United States embraced the "happy dancing" sound. That label was then opening international subsidiaries, and heavily marketed the Delgado titles simultaneously with two of their biggest priorities, the big-band recordings of Bert Kaempfert and James Last. All three orchestras shared the same musicians and recording facilities, giving a sleek professional sound that came to define easy listening big-band music for several decades. Using the name of Delgado, Wende explored many ethnic musical styles, and has been credited with the early popularization of world music, releasing upbeat dance albums and exploring Asian, African, South American, Italian, Russian, Greek, and Jamaican themes, as well as pop hits and show tunes. As with James Last's output, Delgado's records show a considerable sense of humor, covering such oddities as "The Mosquito" from the Doors' Morrison-less Full Circle album as a Moog ballad, with occasional jazzy fills, funky backbeats, or brassy counter-melodies.

Wende also recorded and accompanied many Germany pop stars, and appears on hundreds of recordings by such stars as Freddy Quinn, Lolita, Helmuth Zacharias, Alfred Hause, and Rudi Schuricke. He retired from music professionally later in the eighties. He passed away in 1996, just as his recordings started to be reissued on CD.