After 30 years, teenagers' record draws attention in Japan
BROOKLINE, Mass. --For a bunch of local kids, David, Peter and Leon Gruenbaum put together a pretty good musical career.
The jazz trio of brothers, dubbed Dapele by their father using the first two letters of each of their names, played area schools, libraries and nursing homes in the mid-1970s. They even performed on the old TV talent show "Community Auditions" and at Boston's inaugural First Night New Year's Eve celebration in 1977, earning themselves a cool $100.
When the oldest, David, was 17 and preparing to head to the University of Chicago, the brothers recorded an album of their original compositions just as a sort of family keepsake. They pressed 1,000 copies, sold some for $5.95 a piece, and the rest got stuck in storage.
The boys all eventually went their separate ways, and the album faded into obscurity.
Until a few months ago.
That's when the record, "Bop 'n Pop ... and all that Jazz," mysteriously resurfaced in a Japanese vintage vinyl store, drawing rave reviews and such renewed demand the brothers are considering putting out a compact disc version.
"It came completely out of the blue," said Leon, now 43, the keyboard and clarinet player who was just 13 when the album was made, and is the only brother who made a career in music. "It's not like we went out to market this in Japan."
Their father, Michael Gruenbaum, was the first to realize something was up when Japanese music fans started contacting him and asking questions about the album.
It seems a copy of the record, brought to Japan by a buyer for Hi Fi Records in Tokyo, had sold for more than $200.
A review of the album then appeared on the store's Web site, sparking a frenzy of interest from jazz aficionados and DJs, some of whom were using Dapele's music in their dance mixes.
The writers spoke in glowing praise of the album and wanted to know how to get their hands on copies of the 30-year-old recording. The store wanted to buy at least 25 additional copies.
"I thought, 'This is crazy,'" Michael Gruenbaum said. "What's happening?"
The boys, who took music lessons at the New England Conservatory, formed the band in 1973 and often practiced together in the living room of the family's Brookline home.
They got their musical talent from their mother, Thelma, an author who played piano. She died last year before her sons' music was rediscovered.
But it was dad who suggested the record. The Gruenbaums hired a bass player and a drummer, booked some time at a Boston studio, and recorded the entire album in just eight hours.
"We were just kids then, we had no idea what we were doing," said David, 47, who played keyboards and sang on the album and is now and living in Santa Rosa, Calif., where he is an expert and author on the Scholastic Assessment Test. "We had no idea how to promote it, how to distribute it, but we still got some play on local radio stations."
The album is clean and mellow, the kind of music you might you find these days setting the mood in a gourmet coffee house. David's voice is smooth with an adolescent timbre. Peter's saxophone playing reflects his classical training, reminiscent of Paul Desmond, who played on Dave Brubeck's "Take Five."
"I think Japanese are drawn to the album by a sense of nostalgia for the carefree but mellow '70s sound," said Ryohei Matsunaga, the Hi Fi Records buyer who rediscovered the record. "It's difficult to find that sound in the kind of music that's mainstream here now."
The group's name was originally pronounced day-PEE-lee, but when Michael went to the Registry of Motor Vehicles to get a license plate with the band's name, the registry worker pronounced it dah-PELL. Michael, a retired civil engineer, liked the Gallic panache of the alternate pronunciation, so it stuck.
The license plate is clearly visible on the album cover, attached to the rear bumper of the family's Buick station wagon with the boys -- all braces and shaggy '70s haircuts -- leaning against the vehicle. Their dad still has a DAPELE license plate on his current car, a
"We have no idea how the album even made it to Japan in the first place," said Peter, who now lives in Seattle where he is the president and chief software architect at Red Llama Inc., a medical and educational training software company.
Matsunaga can explain. He came across a copy on a buying trip to the Boston area six years ago.
"I was immediately struck by how good these kids were," he said. "The disc jacket caught my eye because it looked fun, goofy almost. But from the first track, I knew this was something special.
"I liked how the sound was modern and jazzy but also had elements of 70s folk -- very mellow, with a hint of sadness," Matsunaga said.
That first copy sold quickly, but the album was forgotten again, until Matsunaga found another copy last year. That one sold for the equivalent of about $210.
Matsunaga also wrote a glowing review on the store's Web site, which has since sold several dozen copies of the album at the discount price of $67.
Some fans have asked if the trio intends to get back together, perhaps even tour. A tour's unlikely, said Leon, a Harvard-educated mathematician and inventor of a unique computer keyboard musical instrument called the samchillian. Now living in New York City, he has recorded solo albums and worked with a variety of artists, perhaps most notably Vernon Reid, the guitarist for the rock band Living Colour.
The whole episode reminds him of the movie "This is Spinal Tap." In the 1984 comedy, a washed-up British hard rock band gets new life when invited to tour Japan.
"It's incredible, almost comical, just like the movie," he said.
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Associated Press writer Hiroko Tabuchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.
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On the Web: http://samchillian.com/dapele.html
