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He helped the Library of Congress study a medium on the history of jazz and made his own unexpected discoveries.

For the resurrected clay

Larry Appelbaum, a music archivist who, with a long career at the Library of Congress, helped study the medium on jazz history, finding a certain number of vital recordings along the way, died Feb. 21 in Washington. He was 67 years old.

His death in a hospital came here by pneumonia headaches, his brother Howard.

Mr. Appelbaum specializes in one of the maximum complex responsibilities of the Library of Congress: the preservation of speech and recorded music, which implies its movement from one format to another. As a component of this effort, he acquired and treated old recordings collections, a task that did not offer any work, but also the opportunity for fortuitous discoveries.

Its greatest discovery came here in 2005, when the library won a collection of jazz recordings: fragile acetate tapes made through Voice of America in Carnegie Hall in 1957.

“Literally, a whole truckload of tapes that got us here,” he recalled in an interview for the D. C. Jazz Festival.

While crossing them, he discovered a labeling, in pencil, “Thelonium Monk Quartet”, with some clues lists. Interesting, he thought, but necessarily important.

“It’s only when I put the band on the device and heard it that I thought, ‘It’s John Coltrane,'” he said.

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