Phil Schaap: Talking Technology and More

This article was transcribed from a March 21, 2021 interview on the Mister Radio Podcast .

Marshall Katzman: You're listening to Mister Radio, and I'm your host, Marshall. Today's guest has won six Grammy Awards and eight Grammy nominations, including an award for Best Album Notes for Bird, the complete Charlie Parker on Verve. Frank Foster has called him a walking jazz history book. Early in his career, he managed the Basie alumni band, The Countsmen, and for 17 years, ran the jazz at the West End Jazz Room on Broadway and 114th Street in New York City. He attended Columbia University, and during his freshman year began broadcasting jazz on the Columbia University radio station, WKCR-FM, and has been a radio broadcaster ever since. The jazz critic Stanley Crouch once wrote that, quote, there is no person in America more dedicated to any art form than today's guest is to jazz. He is the Mr. Memory of jazz, and as with the Mr. Memory character in The Thirty-Nine Steps, the Hitchcock movie, there are those who think he ought to be shot. He can get on your nerves, but then you can get on his. It is my honor to introduce today's guest, Phil Schaap.

Welcome to the show, Phil.

Phil Schaap: Okay, Marshall, it's been a while since we chatted.

Marshall Katzman: It certainly has. You know, first of all, I certainly hope that I don't get on your nerves today. I thought that I'd heard everything when George Edward Steinhardt, who for 40 years under the name George Edwards, he was the host of the Bright and Early program on WQXR, he told me that he once spliced a wire recording with the tip of his burning cigarette, but you apparently used whiteout to repair a recording. Can you tell us about that?"

PS: No, no, no, when I do wire, which I haven't had too much experience with, I use a cigarette, a slightly lit cigarette ash. That's the way to do it. The whiteout was on paper-based tape, which is, you know, your reel-to-reel tape, and of course that's arcane, and your cassette tapes inside the little shell, which is also arcane. There's an iron oxide, which is manipulated by a magnet for both recording and playback. And the back of the tape has some sort of thing that allows it to be manipulated, but not to be completely unraveled. And so it's almost always plastic, but in the early days, the earliest days in fact, paper was much more employed, and that, you know, paper dries out, and iron oxide doesn't, and other things as well, including stability, meaning fragility would break. So it was largely abandoned, but I was faced with a large batch of this stuff, and it took me a long time to even come up with an idea of how to restore some strength so that it could actually hold and be put on a reel-to-reel tape recorder and played back. And when I finally figured out that I was dealing with paper and not with reel-to-reel tape, it occurred to me that whiteout would be a good way to strengthen the back of the paper and make it stiff again and hold it. And so those are the, so they're two completely different procedures. And at my age, I'm likely never to do either again.

MK: I know from my experience with using razor blades on tape that that transfers to modern day technology as well. I have the feeling that if you don't know how to edit something with either whiteout or a cigarette ash or a razor blade, it becomes difficult to translate that to electronic digital technology used in editing.

PS: Well, I'm not quite sure how complex you want to make this all. I mean, digital editing is completely different. And we're actually mixing and matching. When you use the cigarette ash on wire, boy, your listeners must think this is some real strange stuff. It's not outer space. It's just ancient audio history. That's editing, all repair. You may have to do it because the wire is broken or you may be editing. I mean, no one's really editing a wire recording now, but the whiteout on the paper is not an editing procedure. It's a strengthening of the backing to the material, the iron oxide with the actual holding of the program so that it can actually be used. It's making it a functionable wheel of tape or a reel again. Again, so they're different procedures and different principles. And unfortunately for your listeners and perhaps for the memory of Stanley Crouch, I am an expert in all of it.

MK: Now, is it true that you could take recording tape and bake it in order to bring it back to life?

PS: Yes, and in fact, unfortunately, we will probably have to do that until the reel-to- reel tapes that require baking, and that's its own complexity. Is this a technical show? It's amazing what you're heading into. When back-coating was introduced, and this isn't the chemical corporation, but the binder. So, you know, we're getting into what makes reel-to-reel tape and reel-to-reel tape, so there's the backing, which in the early days was paper and is typically plastic. There are the iron oxide particles, which the magnet manipulates to first record the program material and then to read it on playback. And then there's the thing that holds it, that, you know, the iron oxide can't just sit there. There's a binder, a glue-like thing, which the industry calls, and this is not spelled P-F, but it's called a phizer [sic]. And the binder or phizer [sic] or glue-like material that was introduced in roughly 1973, particularly that introduced by the Ampex Corporation since defunct dried out in a different way than paper dries out and scraped the, if you tried to play it, it would scrape the oxide off and you would lose everything. And this became a huge dilemma, which was first noticed, I'm not saying I'm the very first person to notice, but this is incredibly early. Like I discovered that I had this problem with important tapes. I had a reel-to-reel tape from 1974 of Dickey Wells with The Countsmen, you mentioned the Basie alumni band. And, you know, it was squealing and ruining itself when I tried to play it on the air. So I tried to figure out what could be done. And fortunately at KCR, there was an astounding amount of discarded tape that no one was ever going to use again, unless we recycled it for recording. But because it was scraping, not that anyone was preserving what was on the tape, but it wasn't reusable. It was just a torture chamber for anyone who got involved with it. But for me, it meant that I had something to experiment with. And understanding the principles of the binder, the backing, and the iron oxide, I wondered if the glue could be liquidized slightly and therefore not to scrape. And that meant that I would introduce heat. So when I would come, I was on the air very early in the morning in those years. And when I would walk by a pizza place, long since defunct called "Pizza Town," I noticed that they were heating up their ovens in preparation for the day of pizza making. And so I said to them, you know, you gave me guys like a $5 tip, could I put something in your oven and you take it out after a few minutes or after a few hours or whatever? And they said yes.

MK: I hope they didn't slice it for you.

PS: Well, it really didn't matter because of what was on it. But what it did is over time, I discovered that the baking, the tape reintroduced flow and that you could get a play out of the tapes. Now it's here that there's a huge divergence, which unfortunately is at this very moment and probably for the next 20 to 80 years, going to continue to ruin art irrevocably because the typical approach to my discovery, and I'm known in the trade as the pizza tape guy, I even made the front pages of Billboard Magazine in this matter, is that for some reason, people bake the tapes at too highe a temperature and for too many hours, it does play once and then they throw it out and all you have is the copy you made. But my system is at the lowest possible temperature, as low as 130 degrees Fahrenheit, and for a very short amount of time, 30 to 45 minutes, depending on the age of the tape. You can get a playback, you can put the tape back into your analog files, and then if you use it again after six months and it's scraping again, you can redo it. And there are tapes here now that I have that are approaching 30 years of baking. There's one that I play every December of Jabbo Smith. And since I only play it in December, I have to bake it in December every year. And I keep very careful records. You may know about, again, I don't know if this is a technical program, but toning your tape so there's a 10K tone at the front end so you can reprise the azimuth. And it's never lost any of its high end. So, you know, and I've documented, you know, if you ever see my tape boxes, you'll see that the ones that have been baked, you know, I have careful records of the history of the baking, the dating of the baking, the duration of the baking, and the temperature that it was baked at. Because some of the ovens, and you should only use convection oven that has never been used for food. You know, it's kind of hard to set it precisely at 130 degrees Fahrenheit. It might be 140 or 137. And you should have a good meat thermometer inside. And when I say good, I don't necessarily mean expensive. I mean one that will give you an accurate reading. So, you know, I was talking about ruining these tapes. So in the trade, another malfeasance is that the back- coating of tapes from the early '70s going forward has created a rule of thumb that all back-coated tapes need to be baked. But that of course is wrong. And baking the tapes that don't need to bake dooms them. And shouldn't be done. And yet it's always done. And it's literally in some cases, a crying shame. Scotch 206, Scotch 208, does the 3M company still exists, Scotch. Those never need to be baked. In fact, I informed the Schomburg, you know, the New York Public Library for Black Culture of the value of Scotch 208 reel- to-reel tape at the time that the Scotch company, 3M out of Minnesota was abandoning making it. It's like the last run. And they bought it all out. That's probably a basement at the Schomburg that has 50 boxes of 208 tape from the top of the 1980s. It's good stuff. I still use it.

MK: I'm sorry I didn't speak to you about five years ago. I started digitizing my reel-to-reel library. And if I had Memorex tape, it had that squeak to it. I would put talcum powder on it to get it through.

PS: Well, that's not the end of the world. Getting it to go through. And of course, there are other tape stock problems. I just didn't broach all of them, like Scotch 175 and 176 has their own problems. And some of the later Scotch things, I think it's in the 800s, they have the same problem as the Ampex tapes. And the Ampex, I think, went into the 900s. BASF, originally their 469 tape was a problem, and their 468 tape was great. And if you get real-to- real tape now, you probably could have to buy at a high price the model of the once it was BASF 468. That's good stuff.

MK: But I'm curious to know why you would keep the tapes. Once I digitized my tapes...

PS: Well, you know, digitize the Mona Lisa and throw out Da Vinci. What are you talking about?

MK: Okay, got it. I got it.

PS: The original is always the best as long as it works. A copy is always a copy.

MK: Was this all part of your, I think you call it the Benedetti Project?

PS: Well, the Benedetti Project is its own concern and was a little bit later. My work on curing the Ampex 406, 407, and eventually was a 496 problem, was in the early '80s. And my work on the Benedetti was 87, 88, 89. And of course, Benedetti had nothing to do with backcoated tape. He had paper-based tape. And it was mostly acetate discs, which have their own set of problems. And as I said, I became a specialist in all of these arcane audios and updating them to the CD era, but also preserving them in their originals. And as far as this whiteout is, you know, at the end of getting it to play, I took the whiteout off. And it's now illegal, but with freon, because I didn't want it sitting there eating fruit.

MK: I have a memory quiz for you. Are you ready for a memory quiz?

PS: Well, you know, the last three years have been rough for me, but they say I have a good memory still. Go ahead.

MK: What was the first record that you ever placed a stylus on? What color was it? And what did you play it on?

PS: Well, you're asking professionally or am I fooling around at home when I was young?

MK: Fooling around at home when you were young, when you first discovered that you could actually put a record on a record player?

PS: Well, my first discovery was when I was really young that, you know, and I had in my room a 78 record player with a radio. The one that played early vinyl was, you know, my parents' domain. And I realized that the steel needles were no good. You needed to do something else. And so I told my mother and she explained to me about cactus needles and that by this time they were very hard to get. So that would be my earliest experience. As far as the other end of it in the profession, I think my first discovery was since the conversion, you know, it's not my innovation. You know, the early early playback was soft needles and very heavy tone arms. And the breakthrough was reversing that very light tone arms and very hard needles. That's when diamond needles were brought in. So I wasn't part of that. I'm a benefactor of that. But I did notice that the turntables, you know, and they didn't call it hip hop yet. It was just the beginning of the disco era. When direct drive came in, you can manipulate the turntables much more easily, but the belt driven turntables were better. So, when the radio station upgraded to direct drive turntables for the specialized transfer work, I would revert to the older turntables, and I was very sorry when the station junked them. I remember if you're looking for a real dating of this, in 1978, a long since deceased record collector named Dan Goetter, I remember correctly, G-O-E-T-T- E-R, brought to the station the exceedingly rare Bubber Miley, an early Ellington trumpeter, and the Frank Tesh marker Paramount 78s. They were really rare records, and I met him at a Chock Full of Nuts on 116th Street, and he must have been strong as a moose, because he had a turntable under his right arm, which he held in fixed place. He said, You're not transferring these records on your turntable, and we went into the studio and he hooked up his turntable and we transferred those records, and they played great. And I said, You know, I've been thinking about that, and I'm

still thinking about it, you know. Belt drive beats direct drive, tubes beat transistors and all kinds of things like that.

MK: Speaking of tubes beat transistors, I just want to get back to the transferring of reel-to-reel tapes and digitizing them. Do you hear a difference between the digitized version and the original reel-to- reel version?

PS: Analog wins.

MK: Why is that?

PS: Well, it's a superior form of playback and initial retention. Now, theoretically, digital can improve itself and my colleagues, you know, I've been ill and also I haven't been on the cutting edge of the record business now for 20 years. My colleagues who I'm still in touch with, they tell me that digital has improved vastly in the 20 years since I was doing things like the Louis Armstrong Hot Five Box and some of my other later projects. But, you know, the 78 original still beats the copy you made of it. I'm not enough of a scientist to explain why. Currently, analog still beats digital. And the only exception to be that is when something is entirely within the digital domain. But you still have to, when you hear it, you're hearing it in the original audio acoustic. It has to be converted D to A, digital to analog, and then it has to be amplified and put through a speaker, eventually translated to the sound frequencies that humans can hear. And, you know, everything is acoustic.

MK: I want to get back to your mother and father. I know that your father was an avid fan of Sidney Bechet. What made your dad such a fan?

PS: Well, they were friends and they had an important interaction in the late '40s when Bechet was in New York and my father was still somewhat involved in the jazz world. The reason why they became known is that when my father was still a teenager and was working on his, World War II prevented him from getting it, but he wanted to get a doctorate in French history and was actually writing and he did in fact write a volume of the Encyclopedia of the French Revolution in French. He did translate French to English for the early jazz writers and discographers Charles Delaunay and Hugues Panassié, and they presented to him, this would have been I think in December of 1937, a very obscure 1919 magazine from Switzerland in French called I think Review Romand, and the Swiss conductor, Western Classical, Ernst Ansermet, had written what is actually the first prominent analysis of jazz music, his review of the Will Marion Cook Southern Syncopated Orchestra and his Anselmé's focus on Bechet as having mapped out a new way of making music that was going to be the way of the future. So my father translated that and it was published in English, I believe in February of '38. And even if you were to get it in French today, you would be reading my father's English translation from the original French translated into a secondary French version. And so it made him connected, he conceivably heard Bechet. My mother had already heard Sidney Bechet at Nick's in the village. They had yet to meet, but I don't know if my father had heard Bechet, he had some records with him and of course had been alerted to other records by the French jazz guys. So that put him on a path to knowing Bechet and eventually he and Bechet became very good friends. Bechet was based in New York after the war. My father left the army, he was based in, in fact, they both lived in Brooklyn. And an important relationship evolved that culminated in 1949 with my father handling the very sensitive negotiations to get Bechet back into France since he had been deported from France in 1930. And my father was successful. There were other people on the French end. And of course, Bechet's last decade was as a superstar in France, which however precluded my father retaining a real friendship. I mean, they stayed in touch. In fact, my cousin Bill Schaap went to Europe in 1959 armed with a letter of introduction to Bechet from my father. And Bill got there just in time to go to Bechet's funeral.

MK: For listeners who may not be familiar with Sidney Bechet, what album would you recommend that they start out with?

PS: Well, I would give you Bechet's recommendation, which first of all, you know, in the 78s or at least until the end of the '30s, there were no albums. You know, Beethoven has a good system. He calls it's not the Ninth Symphony from the album Beethoven's symphony. It's Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. You just call a piece of music what its name is. So Bechet would want you to listen to the "Wildcat Blues" and "Kansas City Man Blues" from his first record of July 30th, 1923. And I would want you to listen to his Victor recordings. Bechet recorded extensively for the Victor label, which became RCA Victor from September 15th of 1932 into, arguably, 1943. He made some private recordings for the troops under the Victor Aegis. And they were all great. And I would start with it chronologically, I would go with the September 15th, 1932 recordings. There are six titles. And you know, since you're listeners, and we really are not only going for our field, but we're getting into the trenches on some rather difficult topics. But he's a soprano saxophonist and clarinetist, who is one of the first individual improvisers rather than collective jamming of the jazz musicians at the dawn of the music in New Orleans. And his wizardry and his invention, and of course his swing, makes him as important as just about anybody. And in those initial years, arguably the most important. I mean, it's before Louis Armstrong. He's the most important jazz improviser as of Ansermet's article, and arguably as of 1923. And I also would recommend his Blue Note recordings, which begin in 1939 and continue to 1953. So if you listen to Basie's Blue Note recordings, his Victor recordings, and the one category I left out, the records he made with Louis Armstrong, where there's quite a bit of competition going on between the two, which I think enhances both their performances. And those records would be largely under Clarence Williams' name, October 17th, 1924 to May of 1925, or conceivably October 25th. I don't think Bechet's on the October records, but October 25 records. And then they made a very important record date on May 27th, 1940 for the New Orleans album, the Decca Records. Now we are talking albums, the New Orleans album, the Decca Records produced.

MK: Of course, our listeners can probably download a lot of the tracks that you're talking about. And I know from what I've read, you don't want to talk about downloading. And we only have a few minutes left, but when you first started working at KCR, you felt that radio had abandoned jazz. Is radio still abandoning jazz?

PS: Well, more importantly, people are abandoning radio. I mean, you know, I teach, you know, college age and graduate level, which are young adults, and none of them have radios. None. It's been years since I had a student at Julliard who owned a radio. Years, maybe as many as 10 and certainly more than five. And so unless there's something radical that changes, this radio is doomed. Now, what you're referring to is that when I started, commercial radio was abandoning jazz, was more or less completing their abandonment. And so educational radio and the growth emergence of FM radio picked up that vacuum and I was pleased to be part of it and jumped in at the get- go.

MK: Phil, unfortunately, we're running out of time and I had about 50 more questions to ask you, but I...

PS: Stanley Crouch told you that I was gonna be trouble.

MK: Well, first, Phil, I'm so happy that you were able to take the time to speak with me. Thanks again. And I hope to hear from you again real soon.

PS: Okay, I hope I'm in a position to be heard from.

MK: As long as you keep going out for pizza, you're gonna be okay.

PS: Well, that was a rare event, but I enjoyed it.

MK: Thank you very much again and enjoy the rest of your day.

PS: Right, I used to enjoy, was it Kloster?

MK: Closter, Closter.

PS: I used to visit you and your family one gazillion years ago and I always had a good time.

MK: Yes, I remember your father saying he was offered some wine and he smelled the cork and he would say, "ça sent le bouchon!"

PS: His French was better than mine. So I'll ferme my bouche.

MK: Okay, and again, thank you very, very much and I wish you all the best.

PS: You're most welcome, Marshall. Bye-bye.

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