VERO BEACH — Ed Shanaphy used to beg his mom to let him quit taking piano lessons. “You’re wasting your money,” the next-door neighbor told Shanaphy’s father.
He would know: the piano backed up to the wall of his apartment.
But Shanaphy’s mother held firm.
“She forced me,” Shanaphy recalls. “She wouldn’t let me quit until I finished grade school.”
Her resolve turned out to be well placed. Not only did Shanaphy go on to make music his living, he spawned three musical children in a long marriage to an actress in musical theater.
Today Shanaphy and two of those children, Kate and Ed Jr., play together every Thursday night.
The first paying gig for the Shanaphy clan came about because Ed Jr. was tinkering on a baby grand being stored in a corner of Blue Star Wine Bar. It was when the Central Beach nightspot first opened.
“You’re very good,” said Kitty Wagner, Blue Star’s owner.
“You should hear my dad,” said Ed Jr.
Two years later, countless people have jammed Blue Star’s tiny dance floor listening to Ed Jr. on drums, his sister Kate on vocals, and Ed Sr. on piano.
They are joined on stand-up bass by Dave Glassner, a regular in the Vero jazz scene, who heard them play one night and asked if he could sit in.
Then and there, he hauled his bass out of his van and fell right in with the family trio; he has joined them ever since.
“We call him ‘Uncle Dave,’” Kate says.
The set draws a big following from John’s Island, they say, as well as Orchid Island Golf and Beach Club, where Ed Sr. lives with his wife, Kathleen.
A talented singer and actress, she doesn’t perform, but calls herself the “gig mom,” helping the family bring in their equipment, and doing sound checks before their 7 p.m. start time.
The Shanaphy family has been performing since the children were small.
A second daughter, Meghan, is a trained singer. The mother of two, she lives in Italy and teaches English to Italian children through song.
Ed Shanaphy Sr. plays piano, writes and arranges music, and for more than 30 years published music magazines, including Piano Today and Sheet Music Magazine.
They were the only magazines that had sheet music included. Subscriptions numbered 150,000.
Kate remembers being assigned the job of answering fan mail for her dad.
“I’d get these handwritten letters: ‘Dear Mr. Shanaphy: What an issue! This song, I can’t stop playing.’ They were love letters. Music was such a bond.”
Shanaphy’s company only ceased publication in 2012.
Ed Sr. frequently wrote for his magazines.
With a master’s degree in music from Catholic University, he performed with, conducted and arranged for the Army band. A former director of marketing at CBS Columbia House, he worked in the direct-marketing of compilation albums and reissued records, eventually forming his own company.
After those torturous childhood lessons, he regained his interest in the piano in high school, when he met a particularly good saxophonist who wanted to start a dance band.
They ended up playing up and down the Jersey Shore in the summer, and even found work in the winter.
While in college in Washington, DC, he got a job as the staff pianist at the Statler Hilton.
That led to playing with the Glenn Miller Orchestra under Ray McKinley and Bobby Hackett.
Once, when he was assistant music director for a college play, the director told him to teach a fellow student a song. That student, a theater major, was Kathleen.
In the early 60s, while Ed Sr. was in the Army stationed in France, she went out to Hollywood.
She got parts in “McHale’s Navy” and the film “The Carpetbaggers.”
Eventually she got homesick for the East Coast and came home. They married only after he found “a good job.” It was 1966.
The house the kids remember best was in South Salem, N.Y., where they moved in 1975.
The home was converted from a private theater, part of a large estate.
At one end was a raised stage, where Ed Sr. had his piano. Parties inevitably included performances, even some by their guests.
The family became very involved in local community theater.
They started a dinner theater in a local restaurant and converted an old barn into a stage for summer stock.
Around 2002, they bought a winter home in Vero Beach, and in 2012, they moved here permanently.
Their son, Ed Jr. 44, also moved here when his wife, Sophie Bentham-Wood, got a job in marketing and media relations for the Vero Beach Museum of Art.
Ed Jr., 44, now runs the fitness program and pro shop at Ocean Trail Racquet Club in Jupiter.
He has been an avid player and teacher of tennis since junior high school, when his father took out an ad in the local paper marketing him as a “human ball machine,” with the tag line: “He’ll hit balls till the cows come home.”
Through high school, he taught tennis at country clubs and summer camps. But it was the French horn that earned him a scholarship to Duke University.
He majored in history and political science, then was accepted to the London School of Economics.
Two years later, he didn’t want to come home. He stayed on in London for 16 years, working in direct sales for his father’s music company.
Last year, father and son gave a concert at First Baptist Church, with Ed Sr. on piano and Ed Jr. on French horn.
At Blue Star, though, Ed Jr. plays drums.
“He’s had the kernel of a great drum talent all along,” says his dad. “If I knew when he was little I would have gotten him to play drums.”
When the idea of a trio came up, Kate, 37, was general manager at Citrus Grillhouse. She loaned her brother a conga her parents had given her for her 20th birthday.
At the time, she was studying film at Boston University.
“I thought it might be nice to direct,” she says.
The student productions were typically modest. But Kate, with the usual family flair, staged a shootout that required shutting down streets and using 250 extras in Boston Commons.
In the end, film-making with its erratic work schedule didn’t suit her. She tried several other fields – running an indie theater in San Francisco; working for a New York economist; doing fundraising for the Nantucket Land Council and member development for the Nature Conservancy in New York.
She got into restaurant management working with Mario Batali at Tarry Lodge in Rye, N.Y. Then she was hired soon after Citrus Grillhouse opened and became general manager.
She is now running front of the house at Capt’n Butcher’s in Sebastian.
A third daughter, Meghan, lives in Italy. Meghan, trained in voice, is coming to visit with her two children and with luck, will sit in on a song at Blue Star.
When Blue Star’s doors are open, the music drifts out to Ocean Drive, the family says, drawing in fans of the American Song Book, the Shanaphys’ favorite style.
Around 10, a younger, after-dinner crowd comes in, followed by what the family calls “the food and beverage crowd,” servers, cooks and bartenders from Vero restaurants. “That’s when the dancing begins,” they say.
