Caterina Valente (born 1931) really is one of the highly talented in show business. Even as just a young girl she could speak Italian, English, French, Spanish, German and Swedish; she could dance, she was an actress, entertainer, could play guitar and, most importantly, she could sing. The performing arts were part of her life from her early childhood, from the time that she first took part in the vaudeville act of her family when she was five years old.
Her popularity allowed Caterina Valente to cross the boundaries between the professions with extraordinary ease. She was found alongside Bing Crosby, Perry Como or Danny Kaye in the USA, Peter Alexander or Peter Frankenfeld in Germany, or hosting her own television shows such as "Bonsoir Kathrin." She was just as good by the side of Chet Baker, Ella Fitzgerald or Louis Armstrong as she was in the hit parades, singing "I’ll Remember April" with as much confidence as she sang "Ein Schiff wird kommen" (German version of “Never on Sunday”).
In the early 1950 she was heard by the head of the dance orchestra of Southwest Radio Baden-Baden, Kurt Edelhagen, who then helped Valente with engagements and contacts. She was feted along with Edelhagen at the 2nd German Jazz Festival in Frankfurt (1955), successfully worked with orchestras as that of Werner Müller, and was also known in Germany from 1954 on as a pop singer.
This early years at the Southwest Radio were something special. The recordings of SDR and SWF broadcasting stations from 1954 and 1955 document a singer who effortlessly rivaled the international competition, but did not thrust her own person into the foreground. Valente could swing and enjoyed, thanks to her broad stage experience, a range of expressive means with which we are otherwise familiar only in her great American colleagues.