Charles A. Sengstock Jr., who documented Chicago’s early jazz scene, has died.

Charles A. Sengstock Jr., a music historian who documented the largely overlooked history of Chicago’s white dance bands and theater orchestras, died July 16 in Northbrook, Illinois. He was 93.

Sengstock spent decades researching Chicago’s dance-band era starting in the early 1960s, eventually producing two books. His first, Jazz Music in Chicago’s Early South-Side Theaters, covered the city’s Black theater-district jazz scene of the early twentieth century. His better-known second book, That Toddlin’ Town: Chicago’s White Dance Bands and Orchestras, 1900–1950, told the parallel and less-documented story of the city’s white dance orchestras, radio studio ensembles, and nightclub bands, along with the local musicians’ union history that shaped them.

Beyond his writing, Sengstock spent years building a personal archive that became one of the more significant troves of Chicago dance-band history in existence—some 1,200 items, including reel-to-reel and cassette tapes, LPs, 78s, 45s, sheet music, and transcriptions, spanning the 1920s through the 1990s, along with more than 500 photographs of Chicago bands, musicians, and venues. He eventually donated the collection to the Chicago Public Library’s Music Information Center, where it remains available to researchers, along with a related set of his papers held at the Illinois Institute of Technology.