1965 was an odd year for music. You had The Beatles and The Byrds and the Stones and many other rock groups…but one of the big hits was a little classical-sounding instrumental called "A Walk in the Black Forest" written and performed by a German artist, Horst Jankowski. It was a light, simple tune that, I'm told, had actually been used as background music on the Perry Mason program starring Raymond Burr. It was Mr. Jankowski's greatest hit but far from his only record. He put out dozens of albums with a similar sound and did very well with them…and dozens of other artists covered "A Walk in the Black Forest" on their albums.
I actually met Horst Jankowski. In the early eighties when I was writing for That's Incredible!, we had on a segment about a lady who had had no formal music training but was somehow able to compose music that experts said was frighteningly like Mozart…not as good, of course, but it followed a lot of his structures and concepts and she'd never studied…they said.
Where we found her, I had no idea — I was not involved with that end of the program — but our producer told someone to find a respected musicologist who could come into the studio and discuss the parallels between this lady's work and what Wolfgang Amadeus had done. He also wanted them to find an esteemed pianist who could come in and play one of her works.
Whoever was charged with finding these two people came back and said that one man could fulfill both needs — Horst Jankowski. So he came in on tape day and we wound up skipping the barely-edible meal served to the crew and going across the street to Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles. A few weeks later, we saved the life of another guest on the show by taking him over to Roscoe's instead of making him eat the catered meal in the studio. You will never have service in any restaurant as great as we did walking into a black-owned eating establishment with Muhammad Ali.
Mr. Jankowski did not somehow generate the same excitement but he was a champ in his field. Very nice, fascinating man. He made a lot of albums, most of which seem to have made the transition to digital. I don't know how to label what he did except maybe under the catch-all grouping of Easy Listening. Here's the one song of his that earned a spot on my mixtape…