Phil Schaap

Philip van Noorden Schaap (April 8, 1951 – September 7, 2021) was an American radio host, who specialized in jazz as a broadcaster, historian, archivist, and producer. He hosted an assortment of jazz programs at WKCR and WNYC in New York City and WBGO in Newark, N.J. He began presenting jazz shows on Columbia University's WKCR in 1970, and hosted Bird Flight and Traditions In Swing on WKCR for 40 years, shows which are broadcast in archival versions to this day, beginning in 1981. He received six Grammy Awards over the course of his career.

Schaap was born in Queens, New York, on April 8, 1951. He was raised in the Hollis neighborhood. An only child, he was raised by jazz-loving parents. His father was Walter Schaap, an early jazz historian, translator and discographer. His mother, Marjorie Wood Schaap, worked as a librarian and was a classically trained pianist. At Radcliffe, she listened to Louis Armstrong records and smoked a corncob pipe.

Schaap was friendly with many jazz musicians from a young age. He would see the saxophonist Budd Johnson every day at the bus stop. He was fond of the members of the original Count Basie Orchestra, knocking on Buck Clayton's front door, as well as visiting Milt Hinton's home unannounced. Backstage with his mother at Randall’s Island Jazz Festival in August 1956, he first met Basie's drummer, Jo Jones, who asked if he knew of Prince Robinson (a tenor player for McKinney's Cotton Pickers several decades earlier). Schaap passed the test and when Jones offered to baby sit for him, his father dropped him off at Jones's Manhattan apartment. They watched cartoons together and listened to Basie records with Jones elaborating on what they were hearing.

By the 1950s, many leading African American musicians had moved into residential areas such as Hollis in Queens which helped an emerging jazz enthusiast. In the first grade, Schaap tried to persuade Carole Eldridge, the daughter of trumpeter Roy Eldridge, to introduce him to her father, but only succeeded via her mother. Walter, Schaap's own father, at first disbelieved reports his young son (then 6 years old) was approaching major jazz musicians, explaining in 2001 that he rarely had sufficient courage himself. In his early teens, Schaap managed to gain a lift into Manhattan from Basie himself during the 1966 subway strike and amazed him with his recall of his orchestra's members and their repertory. "There isn’t anyone in the country who knows more about this music than he [does]", Max Roach told The New York Times in 2001. "He knows more about us than we know about ourselves."

Schaap attended Columbia University as a history major. On February 2, 1970, he began broadcasting jazz on the Columbia University radio station, WKCR-FM. He graduated from Columbia in 1973.

From around the time he began as a student-radio disc jockey, he was running the jazz program at The West End Bar on 113th street across Broadway from WKCR's studios at 114th St. gaining work for swing era musicians he had known for years who were by then under-employed. The West End had a side bar called the Jazz Room where musicians hung out. On a nightly basis, he booked prominent swing-band alumni providing them—as he put it in a 2017 interview with The West Side Spirit—"with a nice last chapter of their lives". He said the West End series was among his proudest accomplishments. "A lot of them were not even performing anymore", he said of the alto saxophonist Earle Warren, the trombonist Dicky Wells and the many other musicians he put onstage there. "They were my friends", he added. "They were my teachers. They were geniuses." Among those he booked were The Countsmen, a Basie alumni band which he managed featuring Warren and Wells, Russell Procope's Ellingtonia, Franc Williams, George Kelly, Eddie Barefield, Sonny Greer, Benny Waters, Jo Jones, Buddy Tate, Vic Dickenson, Harold Ashby, Big Nick Nicholas, Ronnie Cole, Eddie Durham and "Doc" Cheatham. He also booked modern jazz artists, such as Lee Konitz and Joe Albany, and blues artists, such as Percy France and Big Joe Turner. He also engineered sound for jazz events, including George Wein's Newport Jazz Festival.

From 1981, Schaap hosted two shows on WKCR: Bird Flight, broadcast weekday mornings from 8:20 to 9:30, devoted to the music of Charlie Parker. and Traditions In Swing Saturday evenings from 6:00 to 9:00 PM. During each show, he presented long and authoritative essays on musical and recorded details. By 2001, the radio station's archive contained about 5,000 hours of his oral histories and he was reported to have raised about $2 million over the years to help the station continue its broadcasts. He continued as a radio broadcaster for a half-century, until 2020, when the COVID pandemic intervened.

Schaap was commissioned by Michael Cuscuna of Mosaic Records around 1988 to rescue unissued decaying recording of Charlie Parker made by Dean Benedetti forty years earlier. Schaap's work saw the recovery of 461 recorded fragments (Benedetti recorded only Parker, some fragments last only 20 seconds) from 18 nights of Parker's 1947 and 1948 nightclub appearances in Los Angeles and New York. Mosaic issued The Complete Dean Benedetti Recordings of Charlie Parker as a ten lp or seven cd box set in 1990.