“Foolin’ Time”
Leo Reisman And His Orchestra; Lew Conrad, vocal
(Columbia 1416 D mx 145983) April 9, 1928
“When The Moon Comes Peeping Thru”
Leo Reisman And His Orchestra; Don Howard, vocal
(Columbia 1416 D mx 144017) April 10, 1927
From the Edward Mitchell collection are two recordings by Leo Reisman and His Orchestra made almost a year to the day apart but issued on the same record.
I don’t know why Columbia held on to “When The Moon Comes Peeping Thru” for an entire year before deciding to issue it with “Foolin’ Time,” despite multiple other recording sessions with the Reisman band taking place during that period.
While Reisman and his band made many excellent recordings for Victor between 1929 and 1933, I have always been particularly fond of the electrically recorded sides the band previously made for Columbia. While the band was the same, its style and sound were quite different during their Columbia years, and I find many of those recordings to be quite charming.
Coming across this record in Eddie’s collection made me recall a conversation with Eddie in which the subject of Leo Reisman came up—and it turned out that he, too, had always felt the same way about Reisman’s Columbia recordings compared to later Victor recordings.
I speculate that the change in styles with the switch of recording affiliations was possibly due to both occurring at approximately the same time the band moved from Reisman’s hometown of Boston to New York City, where it opened and became the resident band of the exclusive and upscale Central Park Casino nightclub. Perhaps the change was due to New York’s high society crowd having somewhat different musical tastes than Boston’s.
Before the 1929 move to New York, the band regularly performed at the Egyptian Room of Boston’s Hotel Brunswick on Copley Square. Reisman’s band was so popular that he operated multiple satellite bands in the city, including one at the nearby Hotel Lenox. During this period, both hotels had common ownership.
(As an aside, Hotel Brunswick, built in 1874, was one of Boston’s most prestigious hotels in the 1870s-1890s and remained fashionable into the 1930s. When the hotel was demolished in 1957, this haunting and almost certainly staged photograph was taken of four elderly people drinking tea and taking in one last musical performance amidst the rubble surrounding the hotel’s tea room.)
The vocal on “Foolin’ Time” is provided by violinist Lew Conrad, who I think was an excellent vocalist and deserves to be better remembered. He made records with the Reisman band until June 1930.
After leaving Reisman’s band, Conrad formed his own band, Lew Conrad & His Musketeers, and, at some point before March 1932, was appointed Music Director of Boston’s Hotel Statler, one of a chain of prominent hotels founded by Ellsworth M. Statler, who died in 1928. Conrad named his band after three fans from the University of Chicago who listened to his radio broadcasts and sent fan letters signed “Conrad’s Three Musketeers.” The band recorded four sides for Victor in May 1932.
While looking up background information for this posting, I stumbled across mention of Lew Conrrad’s possible involvement in events leading up to the mysterious death and perhaps murder of a young socialite and heiress of the Statler Hotels fortune. The circumstances of her death made national headlines at the time and, to this day, remains unsolved.
In a 2010 book Death of a Pinehurst Princess: The 1935 Elva Statler Davidson Mystery, author Steve Bouser presents circumstantial evidence that, between the time he became Music Director of the Boston Statler and the end of 1934, Conrad had been in a romantic relationship with Elva Idesta Statler, the wealthy socialite adopted daughter and heiress of the late Ellsworth M Statler who had founded the hotel.
On February 27, 1935, Elva’s partially clothed body was found in the garage of her home in the affluent resort town of Pinehurst, North Carolina, after arguing the evening before with her husband of two months, Henry Bradley Davidson Jr. Shortly before her death, she had traveled to Boston from Pinehurst to change her will naming her husband, whose family had lost its fortune, as the recipient of her estate.
Whether her death was suicide, an accident, or murder has yet to be solved. Her husband was suspected of murdering her, but charges were never filed.
In a 1936 deposition, attorney Bart Leach testified that, before Elva Statler’s marriage, he had been employed by her “to handle legal angles growing out of a love affair between her and a Bostonian named Conrad, described by counsel as an orchestra member or a band leader.”
The same month as Elva Statler’s death, Lew Conrad filed bankruptcy, listing $8,000 in debts (about $182,400 in 2024 dollars).
Bowser speculates as to whether Lew Conrad might have been after Elva’s money, whether the “legal angels” might have been Conrad receiving a loan from her that he could not repay, or perhaps a financially desperate Conrad making an attempt at blackmail.
Bowser concludes that if her death was thought to be murder and had there been knowledge of a romantic relationship, then “given the timing, if nothing else, police at the time certainly would have considered [Conrad] a ‘person of interest.'”
After his bankruptcy, Conrad continued to lead bands in the Boston area until at least the early 1940s.