[Dixielandjazz] Ahmet Ertegun - OBIT

[Steve Barbone]

Ahmet Ertegun, Music Executive, Dies at 83

NY TIMES  - By TIM WEINER - December 15, 2006

Ahmet Ertegun, the music magnate who founded Atlantic Records and shaped the
careers of John Coltrane, Ray Charles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and
many others, died yesterday in Manhattan. He was 83.

A spokesman for Atlantic Records said the death was the result of a brain
injury suffered when Mr. Ertegun fell backstage at the Beacon Theater in
Manhattan on Oct. 29 as the Rolling Stones prepared to play a concert that
marked former President Bill Clinton¹s 60th birthday. He had been in a coma
since then. 

³Few people have had a bigger impact on the record industry than Ahmet,²
David Geffen, the entertainment mogul, said yesterday in a telephone
interview from Los Angeles, ³and no one loved American music more than he
did.² 

Mr. Geffen said that Mr. Ertegun ³started me in the record business² in 1970
by helping to finance his first record company, Asylum, ³just as he gave
many independent entrepreneurs the chance to start their own companies.²

Mr. Ertegun was the dapper son of a Turkish diplomatic family. He was
equally at home at a high-society soiree or a rhythm and blues club, the
kind of place where, in the 1950s, he found the performers who went on to
make hits for Atlantic Records, one of the most successful American
independent music labels.

He was an astute judge of both musical talent and business potential,
surrounding himself with skillful producers and remaking R&B for the pop
mainstream. As Atlantic Records grew from a small independent label into a
major national music company, it became a stronghold of soul, with Aretha
Franklin and Otis Redding, and of rock, with the Stones, Led Zeppelin and
Yes. 

Ever conscious of the music¹s roots, Mr. Ertegun was also a prime mover in
starting the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. In a music career marked
by numerous lifetime achievement awards, he was inducted into the hall in
1987.

Mr. Ertegun said he fell in love with music when he was 9. In 1932, his
older brother, Nesuhi, took him to see the Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway
orchestras at the Palladium Theater in London. The beauty of the jazz, the
power of the beat and the elegance of the musicians made a lasting
impression. 

His instincts were not impeccable. He lost out on chances to sign the
Beatles and Elvis Presley. But in an industry in which backstabbing is
commonplace, Mr. Ertegun was admired as a shrewd businessman with a passion
for the creative artists and the music he nurtured.

Along with a partner, Herb Abramson, Mr. Ertegun founded Atlantic Records in
1947 in an office in a derelict hotel on West 56th Street in Manhattan. His
initial investment of $10,000 was borrowed from his family dentist.

By the 1950s, Atlantic developed a unique sound, best described as the mixed
and polygamous marriage of Mr. Ertegun¹s musical loves. He and his producers
mingled blues and jazz with the mambo of New Orleans, the urban blues of
Chicago, the swing of Kansas City and the sophisticated rhythms and
arrangements of New York.

Mr. Ertegun often signed musicians who had been seasoned on the R&B circuit,
and pushed them toward perfecting their performances in the recording
studio. Every so often, with his name spelled in reverse as Nugetre, Mr.
Ertegun appeared as the songwriter on R&B hits like ³Chains of Love² and
³Sweet Sixteen.² 

In 1954, Atlantic released both ³I Got a Woman² by Ray Charles and ³Shake,
Rattle and Roll² by Joe Turner. (Mr. Ertegun was a backup singer on ³Shake,
Rattle and Roll.²) The songs had a good beat, and people danced to them.
They were among the strongest roots of rock and roll.

After his brother Nesuhi joined Atlantic in 1956, the label attracted many
of the most inventive jazz musicians of the era, including Coltrane, Charles
Mingus, the Modern Jazz Quartet and Ornette Coleman. In 1957, Atlantic was
among the first labels to record in stereo.

By the 1960s, often in partnerships with local labels like Stax in Memphis,
Mr. Ertegun was selling millions of records by the leading soul musicians of
the day, among them Ms. Franklin and Mr. Redding. Ms. Franklin had recorded
previously for Columbia Records, but her hits for Atlantic ‹ which merged
her gospel roots with an earthy strength and sensuality ‹ were the ones that
made her the Queen of Soul.

Mr. Ertegun¹s music partnerships, he sometimes pointed out, were often
culturally triangular. He was Turkish and a Muslim by birth. Many of his
fellow executives, like the producer Jerry Wexler, were Jewish. The artists
they produced, particularly when the label began, were black. Together, they
helped move rhythm and blues to the center of American popular music.

Mr. Ertegun and Ioana Maria Banu were married on April 6, 1961. Known as
Mica, she became a prominent interior designer. She survives him, as does a
sister. Nesuhi Ertegun died in 1989.

The Ertegun brothers and their partner, Mr. Wexler, sold the Atlantic label
to Warner Brothers-Seven Arts in 1967 for $17 million in stock. Four years
later, the brothers took some of the money and founded the New York Cosmos
soccer team.

But Mr. Ertegun kept making records. When Kinney National Service ‹ a
conglomerate of parking lots, funeral parlors, rental cars and other
unmusical enterprises ‹ completed the acquisition of Warner Brothers-Seven
Arts in 1969, he and his label kept going.

Mr. Ertegun was now a rock mogul. Atlantic Records signed the Stones to a
distribution deal when the band¹s contract with Decca Records ended; Led
Zeppelin; and Crosby, Stills & Nash, who became Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
after Mr. Ertegun persuaded Neil Young to join the group. The corporations
changed ‹ Kinney turned into Warner Communications, which became Time Warner
‹ but Atlantic and its founder still flourished.

It remained one of the only record labels of the 1940s to survive the
multibillion-dollar mergers and acquisitions of the 1990s in more than name
only, with its founder still in charge. Mr. Ertegun reduced his daily
corporate duties in 1996 but remained an inveterate night-clubber, avid
concertgoer and insatiable music maven well into his 80s.

Ahmet Ertegun was born in Istanbul on July 31, 1923. His father, Mehmet
Munir, was the legal counselor to Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern
Turkey. 

In 1925, Ataturk sent the elder Ertegun to serve as the Turkish
representative to the League of Nations. In the next 20 years, he was the
Turkish ambassador to Switzerland, to France, to the Court of St. James
under King George V and to the United States during the Roosevelt
administration. The young Ahmet grew up in that worldly realm. His father,
then the dean of the diplomatic corps in Washington, died in 1944.

That year, at 21, having earned a bachelor¹s degree at St. John¹s College in
Annapolis, Md., Mr. Ertegun was taking graduate courses in medieval
philosophy at Georgetown University.

³In between, I spent hours in a rhythm and blues record shop in the black
ghetto in Washington,² he told the graduates of Berklee College of Music in
Boston on receiving an honorary degree in 1991. ³Almost every night, I went
to the Howard Theater and to various jazz and blues clubs.²

³I had to decide whether I would go into a scholastic life or go back to
Turkey in the diplomatic service, or do something else,² he said. ³What I
really loved was music, jazz, blues, and hanging out.² And so, he told the
students, he did what he loved.