He helped turn the Library of Congress into a leading center for research on the history of jazz, and made some surprising discoveries of his own.
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.
His death, in a hospital, was from complications of pneumonia, his brother Howard said.
Mr. Appelbaum specialized in one of the Library of Congress’s 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.
His biggest discovery came in 2005, when the library received a large collection of jazz recordings — fragile acetate tapes made by Voice of America at Carnegie Hall in 1957.
“There was literally a truck filled with tapes that came to us,” he recalled in an interview for the D.C. Jazz Festival.
As he flipped through them, he found one labeled, in pencil, “Thelonious Monk Quartet,” with a few track listings. Interesting, he thought, but not necessarily momentous.
“It was only when I put the tape on the machine and started to listen to it that I thought, ‘That’s John Coltrane,’” he said.
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Source: Music - nytimes.com
