A Jazz DJ’s Lifetime of Knowledge Leaves Queens for a New Nashville Home
The New York Times
Phil Schaap’s childhood home held what may be the largest collection of recorded jazz interviews, an archive that will now be housed at Vanderbilt University.
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.
