From the outside, the red clapboard house on Clio Street in eastern Queens seemed frozen in time.
Neighbors would occasionally spot the home’s owner coming and going, toting bags of records and bulky reel-to-reel tapes.
“All we’d see in the windows were record albums,” said Tracy Pizzirusso, who in 30 years of living next door met the man only in passing. “It looked more like a storage unit than a house. He said he was a radio DJ.”
He was Phil Schaap, New York City’s encyclopedic historian and dean of jazz radio. Over time, the red house, Mr. Schaap’s childhood home, came to hold perhaps the greatest archive of recorded jazz interviews.
“This is the mother lode for American jazz,” said Sean Wilentz, a Princeton University history professor who, before Mr. Schaap died in 2021, helped find a home for the archive. The material filled two eighteen-wheelers, plus a van that was driven in December to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where it will become the Phil Schaap Jazz Collection.
Now, a team of library workers at Vanderbilt has embarked on a five-year project to further catalog the collection and make much of it publicly available online, as Mr. Schaap wanted.
A jazz obsessive, Mr. Schaap was married only briefly and never had children. At times, he practically lived in the cramped campus studios of WKCR, the Columbia University radio station where he presided for roughly a half-century.
His shows were often lectures delivered from memory and laden with details that could threaten to crowd out the music. But he had such a devoted following that WKCR still has not taken him off the air. Each Tuesday through Thursday, the station plays archived recordings of “Bird Flight,” Mr. Schaap’s morning show dedicated to the bebop pioneer Charlie Parker.
In his longstanding fight to preserve America’s native art form, he had planned to curate and bequeath the hundreds of interviews he had amassed on fragile reels of tape as a research tool for future generations.
“The house was filled to the brim with stuff that Phil always thought he would have time to go through,” Susan Shaffer, his longtime partner, said.
But before he could, he was diagnosed with lymphoma, which threatened not only his life but the fate of the collection.
“He was worried about the future of jazz and the future of his stuff — he wanted to get this done before he passed,” Ms. Shaffer said.
In April 2021, Mr. Schaap summoned a group of his most devoted radio station protégés to the Queens house to sort through and start digitizing the reels. He had hoped to oversee the project through completion but died that September at 70. He completed paperwork to help finalize the donation with Vanderbilt in his final days in the hospital, Ms. Shaffer said.
“It was a real race against time — this was a real miracle,” Professor Wilentz said. “He died knowing the greatest creation of his life was going to be preserved.”
Holling Smith-Borne, the director of Vanderbilt’s Anne Potter Wilson Music Library, said the archive would provide “endless research possibilities.”
“There is such great information there that isn’t anywhere else,” Mr. Smith-Borne said.
The university’s Blair School of Music, which has a robust jazz studies program, is offering fellowships for students to study the archive; creating a bibliography and curriculum based on it; and building a listening room for it.
How a modest red house in Queens wound up holding one of the world’s top jazz archives is a story singular to Mr. Schaap and also to New York’s jazz history.
He was raised in the house, in Holliswood, by parents who were jazz fanatics in the 1950s, a time when the general area was home to musicians like the bassist Milt Hinton, the bandleader Count Basie, and the singers Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne and, briefly, Billie Holiday.
Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie also lived in Queens, as did the trumpeter Clark Terry, the alto saxophone player Cannonball Adderley and the bassist and composer Charles Mingus.
“My awareness of jazz comes from growing up in Hollis,” Mr. Schaap told The New York Times in 1998. “The entire jazz community had moved into my neighborhood.”
When a nonprofit group created a Queens Jazz Trail map of luminaries, including Holiday and John Coltrane, Mr. Schaap’s house was also depicted.
By kindergarten, the jazz-obsessed boy was finding ways to meet and interview jazz figures. He grew close to Jo Jones, a drummer with the Basie band who urged Mr. Schaap to safeguard the lore he was soaking up and to “pass it on.”
Mr. Schaap later took to calling his archive the “Pass It On Collection.”
“What he knew, he didn’t learn from a book, he learned it from talking to the musicians themselves,” said Ben Young, a friend of Mr. Schaap’s who helped digitize the collection. “The musicians said, ‘OK, kid, here’s the bag. Now it’s your responsibility to carry it forward.’”
Mr. Schaap rotated through part-time teaching jobs at Columbia, Princeton, the Juilliard School and Jazz at Lincoln Center. He won several Grammy Awards for his work on jazz compilations.
He became known as jazz’s Mr. Memory, with an uncanny ability to vacuum up dates and details. But because he set little down in books or articles, the information remained in his prodigious memory and in the Queens house, on recordings of interviews and thousand of hours of his radio shows.
Mr. Schaap’s archive includes more than 1,600 interviews — an estimated 3,000 hours — with the likes of Gillespie, Woody Herman, Stan Getz and Lionel Hampton. Vanderbilt archivists believe he recorded full interviews with more jazz musicians than any other single person.
“The interviews are one of a kind and go back to the earliest figures in jazz, right up to the present,” Professor Wilentz said.
Even after moving to Manhattan decades ago, Mr. Schaap continued to stash interviews at the Queens house, along with nearly 20,000 records and close to 600 books. They are also part of the archive, as are the radio shows.
The drummer Max Roach once told The Times that Mr. Schaap “knows more about us than we know about ourselves.” Indeed, there were times Mr. Schaap corrected musicians he was interviewing about the facts of their own lives.
Although he was dispensing history over the airways for decades, he had the presence of mind to keep “squirreling it away” at the red house in Queens, Mr. Young, Mr. Schaap’s protégé, said. The house has been sold, with most of the proceeds going to Vanderbilt to help support the archive.
“All those years, he was sending it out in real time over the air until his radio transmissions became their own significant archive,” Mr. Young said. “And now the world is going to get the chance to click and play it, the way it’s done in a podcasting world today.”
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