The Week in Radio: What's in a name? Absolutely everything

My word, don't they all sound keen, those people you hear on the radio? Not just the DJs, constantly trying to convince you how much they love music and particularly that last record they played, but the continuity announcers, the reporters, the weather forecasters, the newsreaders – they all seem so interested by what they do.

This isn't easy: imagine getting that lift into your voice that suggests you're pleased and you expect other people to share your pleasure, as you tell the world that coming up next is Quote... Unquote. Whatever you do on radio, you have to make it sound like you mean it; and this is, in the end, the hard part, what they get paid for. Even the most hardened enthusiast must have days of ennui; but still they keep pretending they're loving it.

I thought of this while listening to The Christian O'Connell Breakfast Show on Virgin last week, when he was given the job of announcing the station's new name. It is now Absolute Radio – or rather, it will be in a week or two; for the moment, it goes by the awkward handle "Virgin, soon to be Absolute Radio". I'm not sure whether the name "Absolute" does the work the branding consultants want it to: if I asked you to complete the sentence "This is absolute...", what would you put in at the end? Something complimentary? But to get back to the point – which is that, for all the fanfare and kerfuffle and O'Connell's mock-nervous insistence that men in suits would be marking his performance, he sounded to me like a man struggling to sound as if he gave a toss. Quite right, too.

Still, there are pockets of utterly unfeigned enthusiasm. One is Bird Flight, a series devoted to the saxophonist Charlie Parker, broadcast on the Columbia University radio station WKCR-FM, and available here on the web (it's a breakfast show in New York – lunchtime our time). I came across the programme last year, visiting New York, but failed to grasp its proportions until quite recently, when The New Yorker ran a profile of the host, Phil Schaap: Bird Flight has now been running every weekday morning for more than 27 years – 27 years of explaining Charlie Parker, or evangelising for him.

Schaap's broadcasting style has almost nothing in common with conventional DJing: he will talk for 20 minutes about the background to a recording session before playing a three-minute track; or he will play the same track over and over, or in different combinations, urging you to listen harder, to listen through the music to what is going on behind. Many people hate Schaap's style – they think he's an egotist and a fantasist – and it can be hard to take; but it can also draw you in.

This Monday, he concentrated on the famous session of 29 July, 1946, the day before Parker was arrested and incarcerated in a mental hospital, insisting on the pain audible in the playing: "It's a wounded bird, coming down to earth, not able to fly." The most famous track from that session, a "gut-wrenching" version of "Lover Man", he played at least seven times, at one point three times in a row.

This is beyond completism, the pedantry of wanting all the muffs and the alternate takes, though Schaap can do that, too; it's about an almost unhinged desire to identify with the artist, and to make the listener share that identification. It's not even about Parker; it's about pushing the limits of listening, and finding a larger place for art in your life than you ever thought possible. It's mad and sometimes dreary; but it's also magnificent.