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.
It was the find of a lifetime: a forgotten recording of two jazz giants.
Jazz historians were aware of the influence Monk had on Coltrane when Coltrane was briefly a member of Monk’s 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 “Thelonious Monk Quartet With John Coltrane: at Carnegie Hall” and was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Mr. Appelbaum’s 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.
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, as well as the estates of Eric Dolphy, Billy Strayhorn and others, to donate their papers.
Widely regarded within the world of jazz scholarship, Mr. Appelbaum contributed to a number of history and reference works, including “Jazz: The First Century” (2000) and “The Encyclopedia of Radio” (2004), as well as text for the six-CD boxed set “Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology” (2011).
Mr. Appelbaum was more a scholar than a critic, but above all he was a fan. He called his radio show “The Sound of Surprise,” a phrase, borrowed from the jazz critic Whitney Balliett, that he used to describe jazz at its best.
Lawrence Allan Appelbaum was born on April 12, 1957, in Washington. His father, Melvin, owned several clothing stores in suburban Maryland, and his mother, Estelle, oversaw the household.
He did an internship with the Library of Congress while a student at the University of Maryland, and he joined the staff full time after graduating with a degree in radio, film and television in 1979.
Early on, Mr. Appelbaum worked as a sound engineer, rising to become the director of the library’s Magnetic Recording Laboratory. The job involved taking old recordings in often obscure formats and painstakingly transferring them to something more modern — analog magnetic tapes in the 1980s and, later, digital files.
He worked not only with music recordings but also with lectures and spoken poetry, much of it part of massive collections donated by NBC and Voice of America.
After the audiovisual preservation department moved to a new home, in Culpeper, Va., in 2007, Mr. Appelbaum switched to the music division, where he was able to bring his extensive knowledge of jazz fully to bear on his work.
He was known for his ability to sniff out rare gems hidden among vast acquisitions; along with the Monk-Coltrane concert, he found recordings of Sonny Rollins and the Zoot Sims Quartet with Chet Baker.
In addition to his brother, Mr. Appelbaum is survived by another brother, Marc, and his longtime companion, Masha Morozova.
Mr. Appelbaum suffered a stroke in 2017 that left him with mobility issues, though he could still telecommute to work at the Library of Congress. He retired in 2020.
