[Dixielandjazz] Jerry Wexler Obit

[Stephen G Barbone]

Maybe not OKOM, but this man changed the categorization of black music  
from "Race Records" to "Rhythm & Blues." He was also a life long jazz  
fan.
Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

August 16, 2008 -NY TIMES - By Bruce Weber
Jerry Wexler, a Behind-the-Scenes Force in Black Music, Is Dead at 91

Jerry Wexler, who as a reporter for Billboard magazine in the late  
1940s christened black popular music rhythm and blues, and who as a  
record producer helped lead the genre to mainstream popularity,  
propelling the careers of Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin  
and other performers, died on Friday at his home in Sarasota, Fla. He  
was 91.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his son, Paul.

Mr. Wexler was already in his 30s when he entered the music business,  
but his impact was immediate and enduring. In 1987, the Rock and Roll  
Hall of Famerecognized his contributions to American music by  
inducting him in only its second year of conferring such honors.

Mr. Wexler actually didn’t care for rock ’n’ roll, at least as it  
evolved in the 1960s and ’70s. Though he signed a British band called  
Led Zeppelin and eventually produced records by the likes of Bob  
Dylan, Carlos Santana, Dire Straits and George Michael, his main  
influence came in the 1950s and ’60s as a vice president of Atlantic  
Records, working largely with black artists who were forging a new  
musical style, which came to be called soul music, from elements of  
gospel, swing and blues.

“He played a major role in bringing black music to the masses, and in  
the evolution of rhythm and blues to soul music,” Jim Henke, vice  
president and chief curator for the Hall of Fame, said in an  
interview. “Beyond that, he really developed the role of the record  
producer. Jerry did a lot more than just turn on a tape recorder. He  
left his stamp on a lot of great music. He had a commercial ear as  
well as a critical ear.”

Mr. Wexler was something of a paradox. A businessman with tireless  
energy, a ruthless streak and a volatile temper, he was also a  
hopeless music fan. A New York Jew and a vehement atheist, he found  
his musical home in the Deep South, in studios in Memphis and Muscle  
Shoals, Ala., among Baptists and Methodists, blacks and good old boys.

“He was a bundle of contradictions,” said Tom Thurman, who produced  
and directed a documentary about Mr. Wexler in 2000. “He was  
incredibly abrasive and incredibly generous, very abrupt and very,  
very patient, seemingly a pure, sharklike businessman and also a  
cerebral and creative genius.”

The title of Mr. Thurman’s documentary, “Immaculate Funk,” was Mr.  
Wexler’s phrase for the Atlantic sound, characterized by a heavy  
backbeat and a gospel influence. “It’s funky, it’s deep, it’s very  
emotional, but it’s clean,” Mr. Wexler once said.

Though not a musician himself, Mr. Wexler had a natural rapport with  
musicians, who seemed to recognize his instinct for how best to employ  
their gifts. In 1950, while he was still at Billboard, he encountered  
the young singer Patti Page and hummed for her a 1947 song he liked,  
“The Tennessee Waltz.” Her subsequent recording of it sold three  
million copies in eight months.

A few years later he was a partner at Atlantic, presiding over the  
1954 recording session of Ray Charles’s breakout hit, “I Got a Woman.”  
He said later that the best thing he had done for Charles was to let  
him do as he pleased.

“He had an extraordinary insight into talent,” Charles, who died in  
2004, said in “Immaculate Funk.”

Mr. Wexler wasn’t always a mere listener. In the mid-1960s, at a  
recording session with Wilson Pickett, Mr. Wexler wanted more of a  
backbeat in the song “In the Midnight Hour” but couldn’t explain in  
words what he wanted, so he illustrated it by doing a new dance, the  
jerk.

In the late 1960s and ’70s, he made 14 Atlantic albums with Ms.  
Franklin, whose musical instincts had been less than fully exploited  
at her previous label, Columbia. Mr. Wexler gave her more control over  
her songs and her sound, a blend of churchlike spirituality and raw  
sexuality, which can be heard in hits like “Respect,” “Dr. Feelgood”  
and “Chain of Fools.”

“How could he understand what was inside of black people like that?”  
Pickett asked in the documentary. “But Jerry Wexler did.”

Gerald Wexler was born in New York City on Jan. 10, 1917, and grew up  
in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan at a time before the  
building of the George Washington Bridge, when swimming in the Hudson  
River was a summer pastime.

His parents were mismatched. His father, Harry, was a Polish immigrant  
who spent his entire working life as a window washer. His headstrong  
mother, Elsa, had higher aspirations for herself and especially for  
Jerry, the older of her two sons: she wanted him to be a writer.

Young Jerry didn’t care for school much, however; he frequented pool  
halls and record stores instead, and he went to Harlem jazz clubs at  
night. In 1936, as something of a last-ditch effort to straighten out  
her wayward son, Elsa Wexler enrolled him at Kansas State College of  
Agriculture and Applied Science (known today as Kansas State  
University) in Manhattan, Kan. There he first encountered a rural  
musical sensibility, and 100 or so miles away, in the lively musical  
scene of Kansas City, Mo., he could immerse himself in the blues.

Mr. Wexler left college after two years, joined the Army, served  
stateside during World War II, then returned to Kansas State and  
finished his degree. By 1949 he was back in New York, married and  
working as a cub reporter for Billboard. At the time the black popular- 
music charts in the magazine were gathered under the rubric Race  
Records.

“We used to close the book on a Friday and come back to work on a  
Tuesday,” Mr. Wexler recalled in an interview last fall with the Web  
sitePopEntertainment.com. “One Friday the editor got us together and  
said, ‘Listen, let’s change this from Race Records.’ A lot of people  
were beginning to find it inappropriate. ‘Come back with some ideas on  
Tuesday.’

“There were four guys on the staff,” he continued. “One guy said this  
and one guy said that, and I said, ‘Rhythm and blues,’ and they said:  
‘Oh, that sounds pretty good. Let’s do that.’ In the next issue, that  
section came out as Rhythm and Blues instead of Race.”

His work at Billboard attracted the attention of Ahmet Ertegun of  
Atlantic Records, then a small independent label focusing on black  
music. When his partner, Herb Abramson, went into the Army, Mr.  
Ertegun asked Mr. Wexler to join the company in 1953.

Over the next decade Mr. Wexler’s drive, his sales and promotion  
skills, and, according to the business practices of the day, his  
indulging in payola — the bribery of disc jockeys to play a company’s  
records — helped make Atlantic a leader in the recording industry. In  
the 1950s the company produced records by the Drifters, the Clovers,  
Joe Turner, Ruth Brown and, in partnership with the songwriters Jerry  
Leiber and Mike Stoller, the Coasters.

In the 1960s, however, Mr. Wexler and Mr. Ertegun began to take  
different paths. Mr. Ertegun gravitated toward rock ’n’ roll, while  
Mr. Wexler — was drawn to the niche sounds he found in places like  
Memphis, where a small label, Stax Records, its principal studio  
located in a former movie palace, had gathered a mix of black and  
white musicians and produced a sound based on spontaneity and  
improvisation.

Mr. Wexler brought Otis Redding and Dusty Springfield, among others,  
to Memphis. (Eventually, Springfield chose to record her vocals in New  
York.) Later, after hearing a recording Percy Sledge had made at Fame  
Studios in Muscle Shoals, he began producing records there as well,  
bringing singers like Pickett and Ms. Franklin to work with local  
musicians.

In his autobiography, “Rhythm and the Blues” (Knopf, 1993), written  
with David Ritz, Mr. Wexler wrote candidly and self-critically about a  
personal life that he acknowledged had been intemperate, replete with  
adulterous liaisons and profligate drug use.

Mr. Wexler’s first two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his  
son, who lives in High Bridge, N.J., he is survived by his wife, Jean  
Arnold, and a daughter, Lisa Wexler of Kingston, N.Y. Another  
daughter, Anita, died of AIDS in 1989.

In the early 1970s Mr. Wexler helped resurrect the career of Willie  
Nelson with two albums for Atlantic, but he left the label in 1975.  
(It had been bought byWarner Brothers in 1967.) Later he produced Bob  
Dylan’s 1979 album “Slow Train Coming,” a celebration of the singer’s  
embrace of Christianity, for Columbia. When Mr. Dylan accepted his  
first Grammy Award for best male rock vocal performance, for the song  
“Gotta Serve Somebody,” he first thanked God and then Jerry Wexler.

In the 1980s Mr. Wexler helped Linda Ronstadt with her career-changing  
album of Sinatraesque standards, “What’s New,” a project begun when  
she spent an afternoon with Mr. Wexler listening to records and for  
the first time heard the 1930s singer Mildred Bailey.

“When I said I wanted to sing like that, Jerry said the best way was  
to get a pianist and learn how those songs are done,” Ms. Ronstadt  
told The New York Times in 1983. She added, “One thing Jerry Wexler  
taught me was that if you’ve got a sexy or torchy song, you mustn’t  
attitudinize on top of it, because it sounds redundant.”

Given the chance, Mr. Wexler would have produced to the end and beyond.

“I asked him once,” said Mr. Thurman, the filmmaker, “ ‘What do you  
want written on your tombstone, Jerry?’ He said, ‘Two words: More  
bass.’ ”