» Jazz

Phil Schaap whose encyclopedic knowledge of jazz history with sidebar insight into musicians and their music led him to become a remarkable broadcaster, historian, archivist, educator and record producer, earning him six Grammy Awards in various categories died Sept. 7, at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 70.

His partner of 17 years, Susan Shaffer, said the cause was cancer, which had been a four-year struggle.

In the spring of this year Schaap was the recipient of the 2021 National Endowment for the Arts A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy, presented to “an individual who has made major contributions to the appreciation, knowledge and advancement of the American art form.”

As a record reissue producer, he won six Grammy Awards. Three of the awards were for liner notes for multi-CD sets released in the 1990s: “Bird: The Complete Charlie Parker on Verve,” “The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve, 1945-1959” and “Miles Davis & Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings.” He shared the best historical album Grammy as a producer on the Holiday and Davis-Evans recordings, as well as on “Louis Armstrong: The Complete Hot Five & Hot Seven Recordings” (2000).

As a student at Columbia University Schaap worked at the college’s radio station WKCR-FM, in 1970. He managed to transform the little station into one of the most celebrated stations in jazz. After his graduation in 1974 he remained at the station for over 50 years. His two longest-running shows, “Bird Flight” (dedicated to the music of alto saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker) and “Traditions in Swing,” emerged in 1981. Some said Schaap’s daily morning show offered too many details, describing Parker’s lunch at a recording session on a hot Tuesday. It was Schaap’s enthusiasm and pleasant compulsiveness with Parker. He had an incredible memory, total recall. He would fill in gaps for musicians, who couldn’t remember details of certain gigs or recording sessions. When musicians made fun of his crazy memory, he laughed along understanding he had a very unique gift.

“There isn’t anyone in the country who knows more about this music than he [does],” Max Roach told The New York Times in 2001. “He knows more about us than we know about ourselves.”

He helped to establish the station’s signature additions such as music marathons that dedicated 24 hours or more to a single musician, as well as live performances and musician interviews (an accumulation of 3,000 or more). Schaap played music from his own extensive record collection and played whatever he wanted. He made his on impromptu playlist on a daily basis. Aside from WKCR, he also hosted jazz programs on WNYC and WBGO in Newark, N.J.

Saxophonist and fellow NEA Jazz Master Charles Lloyd found Schaap’s broadcasts in the early ’90s and was impressed with his perceptiveness. “Phil was an educator in the purest

(Photo courtesy of Jazz at Lincoln Center) L to R: Max Roach, Daryl Roach, and Phil Schaap Phil Schaap (Frank Stewart photo) and highest sense of the word,” Lloyd said. “He loved all of humanity and made an invaluable contribution— the archive of his broadcasts alone is a priceless treasure, which I hope will continue to be in daily rotation for the benefit of the universe.” Schaap was a jazz activist whose commitment led him to managing The Countsmen, featuring veteran members of Count Basie’s Orchestra, along with musicians from other big bands. He was able to get many of them work at the West End Bar near Columbia’s campus where he programmed live music. David Remnick wrote in a 2008 profile for The New Yorker, “Older musicians, such as Jo Jones, Sonny Greer, Sammy Price, Russell Procope, and Earle Warren, who had known Schaap as an eccentric teenager now welcomed him as a meal ticket.” In addition, he was a curator at Jazz at Lincoln Center, where he created the educational program Swing University; taught at Columbia, Princeton and Juilliard; and was an audio restoration specialist. And for fun he enjoyed swing-dancing.

Philip van Noorden Schaap was born in Queens on April 8, 1951. He was raised in the Hollis community, an only child, he was raised by jazz-loving parents. His father was Walter Schaap, an early jazz historian and discographer. His mother, Marjorie, worked as a librarian and was a classically trained pianist.

Backstage with his mother at Randall’s Island Jazz Festival in August 1956, he met Basie’s long-time drummer, Jo Jones, who on occasion would babysit for him. By age six he was collecting records and having listening conversations with Jones.

As an adolescent on his own accord, he introduced himself to such artists as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Dizzy Gillespie. During that period there were a host of famous jazz musicians living in Hollis, Queens. During the 1966 New York transit strike, Schaap hitchhiked from Queens to Manhattan with his neighbor, Count Basie.

According to Shaffer, Schaap’s collection will be given to Vanderbilt University for educational, research and exhibition purposes, in partnership with the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville. His radio programs and interviews are archived online at philschaapjazz.com, where Shaffer says she hopes they will run “forever.”

Schaap was survived by his partner, Susan Shaffer.

Grant

Continued from page 17

about segregation in 1962. Her Broadway debut in 1963 came in Langston Hughes’ production of “Tambourines to Glory.” In 1964 she performed in the play “The Cradle Will Rock,” set in the Great Depression. 1965 ushered her into television soap operas, as mentioned earlier. In 1967 Carroll started Urban Arts Corps and used it as a vehicle to promote Black and Puerto Rican performers. In 1970 it was where “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope” was first produced. Grant turned her talents to Irwin Shaw’s “Bury the Dead” and created music and lyrics. She also worked on a children’s show—“Croesus and the Witch.” She also wrote lyrics for “Jacques Brel Blues,” and “Don’t Underestimate a Nut,” a musical about George Washington Carver. In the 1990s she took on the role of a Delany sister opposite Lizan Mitchell, in “Having Our Say” and toured for two years in the United States and South Africa. A performance which earned her a Helen Hayes Award.

Grant also directed productions including “Two Ha Ha’s and a Homeboy” at Crossroads Theater Company. She was a member of The Dramatists Guild from 1972 and serve on its Council from 1999. Grant, throughout her incredible life received many honors: an NAACP Image Award; the National Black Theatre Festival’s Living Legend Award; the Sidney Poitier Lifelong Achievement Award and the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Dramatist Guild of America.

Though the musical that put Grant on the map was called, “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope,” she demonstrated her love and dedication to the plight of her people. Capturing the purpose of the musical in our 2018 interview, Grant shared, “With all of this, we have survived because we do cope, we find some way. With all the things that we’ve had to overcome, we’re still walking with our heads high. When you feel down you tell yourself you can’t cope, but in the end you do. The last line is ‘you gotta cope, I gotta cope, all God’s children gotta cope,’ and that’s essentially the message. The song tells a story, too—you got to cope. At the end of the show when I was in it, a couple of us come down the aisle and take the hands of the audience, and everyone is holding hands with each other and it was such a thrill. I used to get letters when I was part of the production. I’ll never forget this line from a white person’s letter. She said, ‘You made me bleed, but your incision was so clean.’ This was the kind of piece that was trying to enlighten people. It wasn’t putting a fist in anybody’s face. Even though the piece is part of history, it is filled with history. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to tell our story. I talked about Daniel Hale Williams, who performed open-heart surgery on a kitchen table because he couldn’t work in a hospital. This musical was written to give recognition of things that are ignored.” Grant’s life will always be recognized as an exemplary example to those in and out of the arts.

Grant is survived by her cousins Daryl Walker, Kimberly EberhardtCasteline and nieces and nephews.

Margaret Elaine Mattic, aspiring actress and a casualty of 9/11

By HERB BOYD

Special to the AmNews

Over the last week or so, the nation has paused to remember and reflect on that horrific day on September 11, 2001, now commonly known as 9/11. On that date, nearly 3,000 people perished in the three attacks from terrorists with the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan as the place where most of the people died.

On this the twentieth commemoration of that moment, a tragedy that I have written about each year since it occurred, it is still fresh in my memory as though it just happened. I had just returned from attending the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa. I was among 400 delegates from America on a mission to charge the United States with a crime against humanity in the Atlantic Slave trade and to demand an apology and reparations.

Ordinarily, I don’t watch television early in the morning but since I had been gone for more than a week, I cut it on to catch up with the news, particularly information on this Election Day. Suddenly, the room was aglow with images of one of the World Trade Center towers belching out smoke. There was no sound and so I believed it was footage from a film. When I heard that a plane had crashed into the building, and a possible terrorist attack was underway, I grabbed my camera and tape recorder and headed downtown.

A livery got me down to 59th Street and wasn’t allowed to proceed any further. I had to

continue my journey on foot, all the while talking on my cell phone with Don Rojas from Baltimore, who told me that the Pentagon was under attack too. I was completely exhausted when I reached Chambers Street where a blockade prevented me getting any closer to the towers. I was there when the second plane blasted into the other tower.

For the next four or five hours I documented the burning towers, watched them collapse, interviewed firemen, and people who had escaped from the towers. One elderly man told me he had just come down some sixty floors. His face and body were covered with white ash which contrasted with the black soot on the firemen on February 26, 1993 when the WTC was attacked. I was in the building when an explosion rocked the building. When someone screamed cyanide, and smoke began billowing from the ceiling, there was a mad dash to get out of the building. Unlike 9/11 only six people were killed then, when a truck bomb was detonated in the parking facility below the North Tower. It was about a week later that I learned that one of my former students, Margaret Mattic, was among those killed in the towers. I was informed by the mother of one of my daughters who, like Margaret, was a theater major. I only vaguely recalled her since those days at Wayne State University in Detroit were so long ago. But I was reminded of her experiences at the school, particularly her performances under the tutelage of the late Earl D.A. Smith. “She was a tremendous actress and aspired to Broadway,” her classmate told me. All of this was new to me, and I had no idea she had come to New York to study and had secured a job in one of the towers. But let me share with you her obit I found online. “Dimples right and left, Margaret Mattic was the only one of the five Mattic girls of Detroit to have dimples. Right and left, the dimples set off the shy smile and the lilting, gentle voice that everyone remarked on. As a young girl, in elementary school productions, she played Snow White as well as Gretel in ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ “The love of performing stuck with Ms. Mattic, a surprise since she seemed so quiet. She studied theater at Wayne State University. After college, more productions followed, mostly in Community Theater, often in plays like “Sty of the Blind Pig,” the 1971 work by Phillip Hayes Dean about a Black family in Chicago. Eventually, Ms. Mattic wound up in Manhattan to pursue acting. She usually took temporary jobs, typically as a receptionist, so she could go to auditions. “Recently, she talked to friends about producing and starring in a one-woman play she had written, called ‘The Vision,’ about how the gift of prophecy changed several generations of a family. At 51, she also wanted the comfort of a permanent job, so she became a customer service representative for General Telecom in the World Trade Center. ‘Every employer she ever worked for always loved her voice,’ recalled her sister, Jean Neal, 56. ‘It was so soothing and gentle and soft.’”

And so Classroom has revolved full circle taking me back to another classroom and a treasured student.

Margaret Elaine Mattic

ACTIVITIES

FIND OUT MORE

Several sites, including Legacy.org have tributes to Margaret, though it’s from her friend and associates in the theater that her remarkable life is documented.

DISCUSSION

Still learning about her ambitions in theater and trying to recall the performances and classroom experiences I had with her.

PLACE IN CONTEXT

Margaret was in her early fifties when she was killed and 9/11 is a date that memorializes her and nearly 3,000 others.

THIS WEEK IN BLACK HISTORY

Sept. 13, 1881: New Yorker Lewis Latimer invented and patented the electric lamp with a carbon filament.

Sept. 15, 1830: The National Negro Convention was launched in Philadelphia.

Sept. 16, 1934: NBA great Elgin Baylor was born in Washington, D.C.