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Larry Appelbaum, a music archivist who over a long career at the Library of Congress helped make it a leading center for research into the history of jazz, discovering a number of important recordings along the way, died on Feb. 21 in Washington. He was 67.<\/p>\n
His death, in a hospital, was from complications of pneumonia, his brother Howard said.<\/p>\n
Mr. Appelbaum specialized in one of the Library of Congress\u2019s most complex tasks: the preservation of recorded speech and music, often involving its transfer from one format to another. As part of that effort, he acquired and processed collections of old recordings, a job that offered no end of drudge work, but also the opportunity for serendipitous finds.<\/p>\n
His biggest discovery came in 2005, when the library received a large collection of jazz recordings \u2014 fragile acetate tapes made by Voice of America at Carnegie Hall in 1957.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was literally a truck filled with tapes that came to us,\u201d he recalled in an interview<\/a> for the D.C. Jazz Festival.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n As he flipped through them, he found one labeled, in pencil, \u201cThelonious Monk Quartet,\u201d with a few track listings. Interesting, he thought, but not necessarily momentous.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was only when I put the tape on the machine and started to listen to it that I thought, \u2018That\u2019s John Coltrane,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n It was the find of a lifetime: a forgotten recording of two jazz giants.<\/p>\n Jazz historians were aware of the influence Monk had on Coltrane when Coltrane was briefly a member of Monk\u2019s quartet, and they knew about the few recordings the quartet had made; now, for the first time, they could hear that influence in detail. The recording was released in 2005 as \u201cThelonious Monk Quartet With John Coltrane: at Carnegie Hall<\/a>\u201d and was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.<\/p>\n Mr. Appelbaum\u2019s influence extended beyond the archives. As a longtime host of a weekly jazz program on the Washington radio station WPFW, and as a regular contributor to jazz magazines and journals, he ranked among the most influential voices in the field.<\/p>\n At the Library of Congress, he hosted lectures and conferences as well as performances, and he persuaded a number of jazz greats, including Max Roach<\/a>, as well as the estates of Eric Dolphy, Billy Strayhorn and others, to donate their papers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Widely regarded within the world of jazz scholarship, Mr. Appelbaum contributed to a number of history and reference works, including \u201cJazz: The First Century\u201d (2000) and \u201cThe Encyclopedia of Radio\u201d (2004), as well as text for the six-CD boxed set \u201cJazz: The Smithsonian Anthology\u201d (2011).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n