Preserving the Fading Pages of a Walking Encyclopedia of Jazz

By COREY KILGANNON

The jazz legend Charlie Parker was born on Aug. 29, 1920 - a Sunday. The saxophonist Lester Young was born on Aug. 27, 1909, a Friday. The trumpeter Jabbo Smith died on Wednesday, Jan. 16, 1991.

These may seem like petty pieces of jazz trivia to some people, but they are nearly articles of faith to Phil Schaap, the loquaciously edifying elder statesman of WKCR-FM (89.9), the Columbia University radio station, who during his 42 years on the air has emerged as one of the planet's more knowledgeable jazz historians.

But lately, Mr. Schaap's recall has begun to slip, his living archive of birthdays, career itineraries and who played what on which session showing some wear and tear.

“I get it all the time. People will say, ‘Phil Schaap forgot something,'” Mr. Schaap, 61, said recently at the station after “Bird Flight,” his 70-minute weekday morning show built around the musi c of Charlie Parker. “I'm not remembering as much and people are amused by it.”

Mr. Schaap is medically fine. It's more like late middle age is taking its normal course.

So, while he still can, he has decided to set down some of his vast storehouse of knowledge in book form.

He has signed with Jazz at Lincoln Center, where he curates the Swing University education program, to write two history books â€" only to find that the process of sorting through millions of factoids to determine which ones warrant commitment to paper has caused even more information to fall out of the overstuffed box of his brain.

“Maybe it's because I'm prioritizing,” he said.

If this is the cost of setting down the lessons he learned from the jazz greats, Mr. Schaap said, so be it, because after he is gone, “There isn't going to be a physical entity that remembers this stuff.”

Mr. Schaap was born to jazz buffs who raised him in Hollis, Queens, in an are a thick with jazz musicians in the 1950s. By age 5, he was buying records and knocking on the doors of every musician he could find, from Buck Clayton to Milt Hinton.

He met Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. He was friends with the likes of Roy Eldridge, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie and the drummer Jo Jones. He said Mr. Jones told him to take his knowledge and “pass it on,” to keep jazz going.

Mr. Schaap had always been able to perform feats of memory on demand, whether listing American vice presidents or rosters of 1960s professional hockey teams. But now â€" take, for example, the cabinet of President Warren G. Harding. Mr. Schaap used to be able to cite all the members and the details of their lives.

“Now I couldn't do it,” he said.

The drummer Max Roach once said Mr. Schaap “knows more about us than we know about ourselves,” and musicians have themselves come to depend on his memory.

For example, Sun Ra, the bandleader, who claimed to be from Saturn, used to corner Mr. Schaap and ask for a refresher on important dates in his career, including what Sun Ra called “Earth arrival date.”

Mr. Schaap would inform Sun Ra that according to his union application â€" filed Dec. 15, 1934 â€" he arrived in Birmingham, Ala., on May 22, 1914. Recently, Mr. Schaap called this a Saturday, but quickly corrected himself: it was a Friday.

He does not have some automatic plug-in formula for figuring out what day of the week a given date falls on. Rather, he refers to other dates that he knows solidly, close to the date in question.

For Sun Ra's birthday, he said, he recalled that his own father, Walter Schaap, was born Sept. 9, 1917 (a Sunday), and he worked his way back mentally from there.

Mr. Schaap even knew Sun Ra's favorite ice cream flavor: banana-strawberry from Baskin-Robbins â€" or was it bananas and raspberries? Ah, now Mr. Schaap wavered for a moment before standing firm on b anana-strawberry.

With a laugh, he excused the lapse. “I got a lot on my mind.”