It's the kind of late-October Sunday that they sing songs about, or did once—sunny and cool, fareless cabs plying Seventh Avenue, wordless brunchers slouching at their tables in the many varieties of morning-after. A short line of gossipers and smokers stand outside Film Forum, on Houston, waiting for "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and "Tokyo Story." Around the corner, at 160 Varick, up on the eighth floor of the public-radio building, nearly vacant today, Jonathan Schwartz, a man in the melancholy blue of his years—handsome once, a little fragile now—sits alone at a microphone in a soundproof studio. He is wearing roomy jeans, a denim shirt, and a Red Sox cap.
A record ends, and the dead seconds fall away, russet leaves off an oak. The air on WNYC-FM is as silent as Miss Havisham's parlor. Schwartz, with no evident concern, lets the nothing happen. He fumbles with a jewel case. He slides the disk into a player. He clears his throat with an alarming liquid rip—ah-HEM! He locates a button on his console and punches it. And then, finally, he speaks.
Schwartz takes off his headphones and wheels around in his chair.
"You like Carmen?" he says.
Schwartz is not merely obsessed with the American Songbook; it's his biography, his soundtrack. His father was Arthur Schwartz, a composer just a rung below the likes of Rodgers and Hart and the Gershwins. For a decade, Jonathan sang those songs at Michael's Pub and other rooms around the city. At the most recent of Schwartz's weddings, his fourth, to the actress Zohra Lampert, Tony Bennett sang a Schwartz-Howard Dietz standard, "I See Your Face Before Me." His Saturday-evening and Sunday-afternoon shows run four hours. It is entirely possible to wish that there were fewer sugar cubes in his brew, that he played more Billie Holiday and fewer cheery cabaret singers, but it is a program, in the age of Clear Channel and Pandora and Spotify, with the rarest thing—its own voice.
At times in his career, Schwartz was on the air seven days a week. "I believe in that . . . constancy," he says. "There are so many people alone, people in hospitals, in jail, who count on a certain reassurance." Come November 1st, Schwartz will be a constant presence online. WNYC will back, assemble, and feature a streaming site called thejonathanchannel.org. All Schwartz, all the time. Ella, Basie, Tony Bennett, the Pizzarellis. And Frank. The higher make-out music. Click. It'll be there.
This article appears in the print edition of the November 4, 2013, issue.