Phil Schaap profile in The New Yorker

[Doctor Strange]

If you've ever listened to Schaap's fascinating, endlessly detailed, mega-scholarly jazz presentations on WKCR (89.9 FM in NYC, or wkcr.org), you may find this interesting:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/19/080519fa_fact_remnick

It's a typically too-long New Yorker article - though that's entirely appropriate in this case, as too-long tangents are the trademark feature of Schaap's obsessive style!

I know many folks find Schaap's broadcasts boring and crazy, but I've listened to him for thousands of hours over the last twenty years, and I've learned an awful lot. He's a unique hero of jazz education!

 

[Fletch]

I learned plenty from Phil until I realized that most of it was learning for its own sake. It didn't add to my love of the music. If anything, it detracted: Was this what this music, so full of joy and celebration of human experience, was all about? Artifact, fetish, reliquary? Secular holy ritual? A service chanted over the grooves, with label, date and take number in place of book, chapter and verse?

(My p.o.v. might be a little prejudiced. I never was much for pure, abstract learning. I was playing music before I was collecting records. I stopped collecting, ironically enough, because it was smothering my love of the music.

So...

)

 

[Doctor Strange]

Well, I'm no musician myself, just a music lover. Phil is undenyingly extreme, and his approach always verges on overkill... but his insights are sometimes very useful. At the very least, he provides interesting historical context to the old recordings, and makes an effort to explain how they fit into the performers' careers and the larger social picture. Who else even tries to do this?!?

Sure, he's not to everyone's taste. But in a world where jazz exposure and knowledge is in a pitiful state (especially among the young), his getting out there on the radio and preaching the jazz gospel daily for decades (for no pay) is downright heroic!

 

[Fletch]

Yeah, it's sometimes pretty hard to see those things from so close up.

It would just be great if there were a few more knowledgeable folks out there who weren't so extreme. You know, for the sake of outreach. One reason jazz is dying out in so many places is because it does tend to retreat somewhat from the world. And the world does notice.

When Phil visited Larry Lucie up at the nursing home, he finally began to seem human and alive. Otherwise he came off like a stock New York obsessive-compulsive, which makes me sad.

 

[dhermann1]

About 17 years ago I MC-ed a NY Swing Dance Society event at Roseland. I got to stand on the stage right next to the great Iloinois Jacquet and introduce the band. Illinois was dressed to the nines, I had my old vintage double breasted tux. Everyone there was dolled up to the max. Phil Schaap was there to make a presentaion of some sort. He came on stage wearing rumpled jeans, a rumple short sleeved shirt, a brown suede vest and engineer boots. He looked like a freakin' hippy (not that there's anything wrong PER SE with being a hippy, but I mean come on.) I was rather irked.
If he only knew where to draw the line. I learn a lot from his shows. He exposes me to music I never would hear otherwise. But then he just gets lost in space and I want to throw something at the radio.
On the other hand Rich Conaty, whose terrific show "The Big Broadcast" airs on WFUV and WFUV.ORG every Sunday night at 8 EST, eschews all that sort of stuff completely. It's all about the music and enjoying the music with Rich.
That's why I've been a loyal member of the Big Broadcast Radio Family of the Air for 30 years now.