The Leo Reisman Hits Collection 1921-40

Leo Reisman was a violinist and bandleader whose orchestra initially came to popularity in the 1920s as a society orchestra performing at New York’s Central Park Casino, becoming one of the first orchestras who racked up a long string of hits in what was called the “sweet” style of orchestral and dance band music which appealed to the broad spectrum of middle America during the inter-war years and through the ‘40s into the early ‘50s in what is sometimes called the golden age of popular music. Performing at prestigious hotels and on radio, he helped popularise some of the hit songs from movies and Broadway shows of the time, occasionally featuring the stars from those shows or the composers of the songs performing vocals on his records, including Ferd Astaire, Harold Arlen, Arthur Schwartz and Clifton Webb, as well as other rising stars like Lee Wiley, along with many other vocalists like Lew Conrad, Frank Luther, Frances Maddux, Dick Robertson, Sally Singer and Lou Levin. This great-value 72-track 3-CD set consists entirely of recordings which before 1940 were credited with a Top 20 chart position in Joel Whitburn’s “Pop Memories” or Elston Brooks’ “The Weekly Top Ten Tunes For The Last Fifty Years” books, or the Your Hit Parade chart, or appeared in one of the Billboard charts thereafter. It features most of his eighty or so career hits, including the No. 1s “The Wedding of the Painted Doll”, “I'll See You Again”, “Paradise”, “Night And Day”, “Stormy Weather”, “The Continental”, “Cheek To Cheek”. It’s a substantial, enjoyable and nostalgic journey through an era in the USA when pop music was an antidote to some difficult social, economic and political upheavals.