DAVID PETER LEON = DAPELE

Dapele: Whose Blues & How Do You Love?
From Bop ‘N Pop…And All that Jazz (Dapele, 1978)

I love random LPs like this. It looks instantly forgettable with its cheesy packaging and these photos of three white teenagers mugging for the camera on the back. After all, their main claim to fame includes having played at the Boston Public Library. It’s the kind of album that people pass by in bargain bins all the time yet here are these three brothers, the oldest being 18, the youngest, 15, and they make a really solid jazz album with great straight-ahead songs like “Whose Blues” and decent ballads by eldest brother David Gruenbaum (Dapele is an amalgam of their names: DAvid, PEter, LEon). He’s no Andy Bey or anything but he’s at least a little better than Carrot Top aka John Stevens on American Idol on a song like “How Do You Love?” Just proving that you can find ANYTHING on the internet, brother Leon is still a jazz musican and has his site here: Samchillian.com.