Jazz scholar, historian immersed in genre
Childhood obsession gave life enrichment
Phil Schaap, a broadcaster, scholar, educator and Grammy Award-winning record producer who seemed a walking embodiment of jazz history, died Tuesday at a Manhattan hospital. He was 70.
His death, from lymphoma, was announced by Susan Shaffer, his companion of 17 years.
From earliest childhood, Schaap (pronounced “shapp”) was obsessed with jazz, and his passion only deepened. Before he was in his teens, on his own volition he had introduced himself to many great artists — Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Dizzy Gillespie among them — who were astonished by the young man’s precocious authority. During the 1966 New York transit strike, Schaap hitchhiked 15 miles from Queens to Manhattan with a neighbour, the bandleader Count Basie.
The young Schaap talked to the musicians he sought out about everything, eagerly and in the most minute detail — and he forgot nothing.
“There isn’t anyone in the country who knows more about this music than he (does),” the drummer Max Roach once said. “He knows more about us than we know about ourselves.”
For almost 50 years, Schaap was affiliated with Columbia University’s WKCR-FM, where he was unpaid but had the freedom to explore any music that interested him. He did shows of every kind at WKCR but was best known for “Bird Flight,” a weekday-morning program devoted to the improvisations of the saxophone great Charlie Parker.
Schaap did things differently. He relied on his own collection and played whatever he wanted, for as long as he wanted. The fact that WKCR was staffed by volunteers and not beholden to ratings or profits freed him to go deeply into the music he loved, which included conducting recorded interviews with the musicians he admired. Soon he had some 3,000 of them. And so a college radio station unexpectedly became one of the leading repositories of jazz history in the United States.
According to Shaffer, his only survivor, Schaap’s collection will be given to Vanderbilt University for educational, research and exhibit purposes, in partnership with the National Museum of African-american Music in Nashville.