“Phil took these guys out of the Chock Full o’ Nuts and put them on the stage of the West End,” Loren Schoenberg, the executive director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, told me. “So for the young people who idolized them, and guys who’d never heard of them, Phil brought them to us.” Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, an early rhythm-and-blues star, used to call Phil Schaap’s mother at home and beg her to get her son to do for him what he’d done for the horn players of the Basie band.

As “Bird Flight” became a fixture of the jazz world, Schaap began to get jobs teaching, but, even with the rise of academic jazz programs, no one has offered him a professorship. Some of his students—including Ben Ratliff, who is now the main jazz critic for the Times, and Jerome Jennings, a drummer for, among others, Sonny Rollins—swear by Schaap as a teacher, but some complain that his displays of memory can be tiresome and aimed at underscoring his students’ cluelessness. This spring, I took Schaap’s Charlie Parker course at Swing University, the educational wing of Jazz at Lincoln Center, and could see both sides. In four two-hour evening sessions, he provided an incisive, moving narrative of Parker’s incandescent career, but he could also be oppressive, not least with his pointless occasional class “surveys.” “Who knows ‘Yardbird Suite’?” he’d ask. Then, moving from desk to desk, he’d poll the students, embarrassing those honest enough to confess their ignorance.

As a teacher, Schaap is less concerned about the tender sensibilities of his students than with developing knowledgeable and passionate listeners. “The school system is creating six thousand unemployable musicians a year—from the Berklee College of Music, Rutgers, Mannes, Manhattan, Juilliard, plus all the high schools,” he said. “There are more and more musicians, and no gigs, no one to listen. So what happens to these kids? They work their way back to the educational system and help create more unemployable musicians. My rant is this: I’m not trying to teach you to play the alto sax. No. I’m trying to get you to learn how to listen to Charlie Parker. Louis Armstrong is the greatest musician of the twentieth century. But name twenty musicians today who really listen to Louis Armstrong. Go ahead: I’ll give you a week.”

There are many excellent young (and youngish) jazz musicians around, including the pianist Jason Moran and the sax player Joshua Redman, to say nothing of the extended family of players around Wynton Marsalis. In February, Herbie Hancock won an Album of the Year Grammy for his arrangements of Joni Mitchell songs. But, generally, a hit album in jazz means sales of ten thousand. Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, and a few other giants of an earlier time still roam the earth, but even they cannot reliably sell out a major hall. Coleman’s concert at Town Hall in March was as thrilling a musical event as has taken place this year in New York. The theatre was at least a quarter empty.

“In the fall of 1976, when Woody Herman was rehearsing for a forty-year-anniversary concert at Carnegie Hall, I was invited to watch,” Schaap told me. “A saxophonist wasn’t paying attention, and at one point Woody Herman crept up on him, put his face next to the musician’s, and said, ‘Son, what do you want to be?’ And the guy said, ‘I want to be the next Stan Getz.’ And Woody Herman said, ‘Son, there’s not gonna be another Stan Getz!’ In other words, people like Stan Getz and Woody Herman were pop stars! That’s not going to happen again.”

In the spring of 1947, around the same time that Charlie Parker was playing the Hi-De-Ho club, in Los Angeles, a young Bedouin herding goats along the northwest shore of the Dead Sea discovered several tall clay jars that contained manuscripts written in ancient Hebrew and Aramaic. Wrapped in linen, the manuscripts were part of a much larger cache of ancient texts, which came to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

“For decades, there were rumors that jazz had its own Dead Sea Scrolls,” Schaap told me more than once. “One was a cylinder recording of Buddy Bolden”—the New Orleans cornettist and early jazz pioneer who was committed to a mental institution before the rise of 78s. “But this will probably never be found. The second, of course, is called ‘the Benedetti recordings.’ ”

All of Schaap’s listeners have grown accustomed to his close attention to the “crucial” obscurities of the Parker discography: “the unaccompanied 1940 alto recording in Kansas City,” “the paper disk of ‘Cherokee,’ ” “the Wichita transcriptions,” and “the little-known Clyde Bernhardt glass-based acetate demo disks.” These recordings can be revelatory, but they also try the patience. Recently on “Bird Flight,” Schaap showcased a home recording of Parker in February, 1943—important because he was playing tenor saxophone, not his customary alto—and the sound was so bad that you couldn’t quite tell if you were hearing “Sweet Georgia Brown” or radio waves from the surface of the planet Uranus.

The Benedetti recordings, however, occupy a privileged place not only in Schaap’s mental Bird cage but also in musical history. And Schaap helped bring them out of their urns.

For decades, stories circulated in the jazz world that Dean Benedetti, a saxophonist of modest distinction, upon hearing Parker play in the mid-forties, threw his own horn into the sea and pledged himself to follow Parker everywhere he went, recording his hero’s performances. Benedetti was said to have obtained, through Army connections, a Nazi-era German wire recorder, and he carried out his mission at clubs, concert halls, and private apartments all over the world. In the meantime, he was rumored to be a drug dealer who supplied Bird, a longtime addict, with heroin. Many of the legends of Benedetti’s devotions came from “Bird Lives!,” an entertaining but iffy biography published in 1973 by a Los Angeles-based record producer, Ross Russell. Through the decades, no recordings surfaced. Ornithologists could not help but wonder: Had they been lost? Had they sunk, as rumored, along with a freighter in the Atlantic? Eventually, only the most committed, with their collections of 78s and back issues of Down Beat, spoke much of the matter. Like “the Bolden cylinder,” the Benedetti recordings seemed to have taken their eternal rest in the watery grave of jazz legend.

But then, in 1988, Benedetti’s surviving brother, Rigoletto (Rick), got in touch with Mosaic, a small jazz outfit in Stamford, Connecticut, that specializes in reissues from the vaults of the major labels. It was true, Rick Benedetti informed the owner, Michael Cuscuna: there really were recordings. Was Mosaic interested?

“The real backstory was incredible,” Cuscuna told me.

On July 29, 1946, Parker was in desperate shape: depressed, drinking, strung out, broke, and lonely in Los Angeles, he had struggled through an afternoon recording session with the trumpeter Howard McGhee. His recording that day of “Lover Man” was a technical mess—Parker was barely able to make it through the song—but it is a painful howl, as devastating to hear as Billie Holiday’s last sessions. That night, at the Civic Hotel, Parker twice wandered into the lobby naked. Later on, he fell asleep while smoking, setting his mattress on fire. The police arrested him and a judge had him committed to the Camarillo State Hospital, a psychiatric facility. When he was released, six months later, he was off heroin for the first time since he was a teen-ager in Kansas City. His musician friends threw a jam-session party for him on February 1, 1947, at the home of a trumpet player named Chuck Copely. One of the guests was a handsome young man—pencil mustache, dark eyes, hipster clothes—named Dean Benedetti.

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Benedetti went out and bought a Wells-Gardner 78-r.p.m. portable disk-cutter at Sears, Roebuck and, in March, recorded Parker playing with Howard McGhee’s band at the Hi-De-Ho. (The historical bonus here is that Parker plays tunes from McGhee’s repertory, and so we hear him soloing, for the first and last time, on Gus Arnheim’s “Sweet and Lovely” and Al Dubin and Harry Warren’s “September in the Rain.”) Later that year, in New York, Parker was back on drugs but still at the height of his musical powers. He formed what is now considered his “golden-era” quintet: Parker on alto sax, the twenty-one-year-old Miles Davis on trumpet, Max Roach on drums, Duke Jordan on piano, and Tommy Potter on bass. Benedetti recorded the quintet on March 31, 1948, at the Three Deuces, on Fifty-second Street, Parker’s primary base of operations. By this time, Benedetti was using heroin and had no means of support; when the management realized that he didn’t plan to spend any money, it provided him with what Schaap would call “the ultimate New York discourtesy”—it threw him out. In Schaap’s terms, it is a “tragedy” that Benedetti was unable to record the rest of Parker’s nights at the Three Deuces. And it is true that, of all the Benedetti recordings, these are the most significant. On “Dizzy Atmosphere,” Parker plays with dangerous abandon, a runaway truck speeding down the highway into oncoming traffic, never crashing; and even the twenty-six-second passage from the ballad “My Old Flame” is memorable, a glimpse of human longing in sound.