Phil Schapp and the Exhaustion of Research

“That’s one way of looking at the matter. Another is that Schapp puts his frenzied memory and his obsessive attention to the arcane in the service of something important: the struggle of memory against forgetting—not just the forgetting of a sublime music but forgetting in general.” — David Remnick, “Bird Watcher”

We mourn the passing of Phil Schapp

As long as I can remember —at least during those times I resided in NYC, within the reach of Columbia University’s WKCR radio, which as it happens was the first radio or TV station to transmit its signal from an antenna atop the South Tower of the World Trade Center — I would listen to Phil Schapp’s morning program on Charlie Parker, called “Birdflight” as I commuted to school in the morning The program ran from 8:20 am and ran until 9:40, an odd time for a radio show. It didn’t quite line up with most morning commutes or competing programs (not that there has ever been anything quite like it before during or since). It always seemed like one of those odd starting times of elementary schools, which because they had to navigate around district-wide school bus schedules were staggered at weird ten minute intervals. But it worked for my commute and Phil Schapp’s voice coming out of the radio while I drove up Peninsula Blvd is part of who I am.

I wasn’t an avid Jazz fan, though I loved and knew the music pretty well. For me it wasn’t Bird or Coltrane, it was Mingus around which everything else swirled. But beyond individual preferences and individual musicians or groups there was always this sense for me of Jazz as a deeply rooted art form, one where the technical proficiency of so many musicians was matched by the vocabulary and expression of the form. Jazz had a history that was deep and wide. And no one was more knowledgeable about this history than Phil Schapp. He delivered it in this dry almost professorial voice, though there was none of the ego of academics about Schapp. Sure he had a “specialty” (Bird) but he didn’t try to come across as the pontificating sage. At times he was recounting things that he knew and had thought about. At other times, he was clearly thinking through material, a process that would in many cases end with his confession that he couldn’t come to any conclusions about this or that bit of esoteric information.

It was this humility, this ability to let gaps in knowledge stand as gaps (but doing so only after exhaustive research) that attracted me to Schapp and shaped my view of what a researcher was or could be.

I didn’t listen to his show during its entire run, but I recall it vividly from the late eighties. I left NYC for a while for much of the nineties and didn’t think much about Birdflight, engaged as I was in my own research. But when I returned to New York more than a decade later and began a different commute, I recall instinctively pressing that pre-set, this time on the Van Wyck, and from the speakers Schapp’s voice emanating, like there was never even any interruption. That’s my memory. Read the articles I link to above and find out more about him to get a sense of size of the loss, the blow that history will take with his passing