Herbert "Herb" Rehbein (April 15, 1922 – July 28, 1979) was a German songwriter, composer and arranger of light orchestral music.

Herbert Rehbein and Bert Kaempfert were longtime songwriting collaborators, but Rehbein's three solo albums contain none of the "happy beat" or melancholy "Wonderland" dreamscapes associated with Kaempfert. Rehbein's forte was the soft string sound of old-fashioned romantic mood music like that of Jackie Gleason or Mantovani.

Rehbein's three Decca albums were Music to Soothe That Tiger from 1964, Love After Midnight from 1967, and ...And So to Bed from 1969. As the titles suggest, these albums are soundtracks for romantic interludes in the vein of Gleason's Romantic Jazz or the Violins of Versailles' Beautiful Music to Love By.

Easy listening instrumental music was getting downright funky in the late '60s thanks to the likes of Hugo Montenegro and Enoch Light, but Rehbein stayed true to the "beautiful music" ethos of strings, strings, and more strings -- string melodies and countermelodies, a lead instrument against a sonorous bed of strings, occasionally a soft horn or other instrument to add subtle hues.

Rehbein creates a haunted rendition of "Ebb Tide" with cascading strings, a honey-in-the-horn promenade through "When I Fall in Love," and a glimmering "September Song" fashioned from a Mantovani-like wall of strings. There are also a great many melodies Rehbein and Kaempfert wrote together, performed with some of Kaempfert's instrumentalists, so these albums will interest Kaempfert's fans as well as mood music connoisseurs.



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