Bird-watcher.(Phil Schaap, Bird Flight)(Brief biography)

Every weekday for the past twenty-seven years, a long-in-the-tooth history major named Phil Schaap has hosted a morning program on WKCR, Columbia University's radio station, called "Bird Flight," which places a degree of attention on the music of the bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker that is so obsessive, so ardent and detailed, that Schaap frequently sounds like a mad Talmudic scholar who has decided that the laws of humankind reside not in the ancient Babylonian tractates but in alternate takes of "Moose the Mooche" and "Swedish Schnapps."

For Schaap, Bird not only lives; he is the singular genius of mid-century American music, a dynamo of virtuosity, improvisation, harmony, velocity, and feeling, and no aspect of his brief career is beneath consideration. Schaap's discursive monologues on a single home recording--say, "the Bob Redcross acetate" of Parker playing in the early nineteen-forties over the Benny Goodman Quartet's 1937 hit "Avalon"--can go on for an entire program or more, blurring the line between exhaustive and exhausting. There is no getting to the end of Charlie Parker, and sometimes there is no getting to the end of "Bird Flight." The program is the anchor of WKCR's daily schedule and begins at eight-twenty. It is supposed to conclude at nine-forty. In the many years that I've been listening, I've rarely heard it end precisely as scheduled. Generations of Columbia d.j.s whose programs followed Schaap's have learned to stand clutching an album of the early Baroque or nineteenth-century Austrian yodelling and wait patiently for the final chorus of "I'll Always Love You Just the Same."

Schaap's unapologetic passion for a form of music half a century out of the mainstream is, at least for his listeners, a precious sign of the city's vitality; here is one obstinate holdout against the encroaching homogeneity of Clear Channel and all the other culprits of American sameness. There is no exaggerating the relentlessness of Schaap's approach. Not long ago, I listened to him play a recording of "Okiedoke," a tune that Parker recorded in 1949 with Machito and His Afro-Cuban Orchestra. Schaap, in his pontifical baritone, first provided routine detail on the session and Parker's interest (via Dizzy Gillespie) in Latin jazz, and then, like a car hitting a patch of black ice, he veered off into a riff of many minutes' duration on the pronunciation and meaning of the title--of "Okiedoke." Was it "okey-doke" or was it, rather, " 'okey-dokey,' as it is sometimes articulated"? What meaning did this innocent-seeming entry in the American lexicon have for Bird? And how precisely was the phrase used and understood in the black precincts of Kansas City, where Parker grew up? Declaring a "great interest in this issue," Schaap then informed us that Arthur Taylor, a drummer of distinction "and a Bird associate," had "stated that Parker used 'okeydokey' as an affirmative and 'okeydoke' as a negative." And yet one of Parker's ex-wives had averred otherwise, saying that Parker used "okeydoke" and "okeydokey" interchangeably. (At this point, I wondered, not for the first time, where, if anywhere, Schaap was going with this.) Then Schaap introduced into evidence a "rare recording of Bird's voice," in which Parker is captured joshing around onstage with a disk jockey of the forties and fifties named Sid Torin, better known as Symphony Sid. After a bit of chatter, Sid instructs Parker to play another number: "Blow, dad, go!"

Okeydoke, says Bird.

Like an assassination buff looping the Zapruder film, Schaap repeated the snippet several times and then concluded that Charlie Parker did not use "okeydoke" as a negative. "This," Schaap said solemnly, "tends to revise our understanding of the matter." The matter was evidently unexhausted, however, as he launched a rumination on the cowboy origins of the phrase and the Hopalong Cassidy movies that Parker might well have seen, and perhaps it was at this point that listeners all over the metropolitan area, what few remained, either shut off their radios, grew weirdly fascinated, or called an ambulance on Schaap's behalf. At last, Schaap moved on to other issues of the Parker discography, which begins in 1940, with an unaccompanied home recording of "Honeysuckle Rose" and "Body and Soul," and ends with two Cole Porter tunes, "Love for Sale" and "I Love Paris," played three months before his death, in 1955.

Schaap is not a musician, a critic, or, properly speaking, an academic, though he has held teaching positions at Columbia, Princeton, and Juilliard. And yet through "Bird Flight" and a Saturday-evening program he hosts called "Traditions in Swing," through his live soliloquies and his illustrative recordings, commercial and bootlegged, he has provided an invaluable service to a dwindling art form: in the capital of jazz, he is its most passionate and voluble fan. He is the Bill James of his field, a master of history, hierarchies, personalities, anecdote, relics, dates, and events; but he is also a guardian, for, unlike baseball, jazz and the musicians who play it are endangered. Jazz today is responsible for only around three per cent of music sales in the United States, and what even that small slice contains is highly questionable. Among the current top sellers on Amazon in the jazz category are easy-listening acts like Kenny G and Michael Buble.

For decades, jazz musicians have joked about Schaap's adhesive memory, but countless performers have known the feeling that Schaap remembered more about their musical pasts than they did and was always willing to let them in on the forgotten secrets. "Phil is a walking history book about jazz," Frank Foster, a tenor-sax player for the Basie Orchestra, told me. Wynton Marsalis says that Schaap is "an American classic."