Ahmet Ertegun – Cultural Titan

The poignancy of Ahmet Ertegun’s death late last year at the age of 84 has been reinforced since then by my 11-year old daughter’s insistence that we keep playing the Atlantic Greatest Hits CD I pulled out on hearing the news of his passing. Why is it that 40 and 50 year old recordings have such immediacy and joy for her? The answer, I think, is that the music continues to inform and reflect our culture.

Son of a Turkish ambassador, Ahmet started Atlantic Records in 1947 simply because he loved American jazz and r ‘n’ b so much. His brother Nesuhi and their friend Jerry Wexler (a Billboard columnist who coined the term “rhythm ‘n’ blues”) joined them a few years later. Over the next three decades or so they created and/or developed some of the greatest American artists – The Drifters (and from them Clyde McPhatter), Aretha Franklin, John Coltrane, Charlie Mingus, Roberta Flack and Ray Charles among them.

In the early days they frequently wrote songs for their artists; there is an illuminating tape of Ahmet teaching Ray Charles in his urbane Turkish-American accent the words to “It Should Have Been Me”, one of the earliest songs where Ray Charles sounds like Ray Charles and not one of his influences. A decade or so later Jerry Wexler signed the failing Aretha Franklin, took her down to Alabama and created the canon of sublime soul for which she is rightly remembered.

Make no mistake – these guys were in it for the money. But it’s a refined mind that decides to take a German communist’s Thirties agitprop aria of violence and nihilism, gild it with a brassy Las Vegas arrangement and give it to Bobby Darrin as a pop music vehicle to fame and fortune. Fifties years later ‘Mack The Knife’ can still light up a dance floor with joy.

Songs like ‘Under The Boardwalk’ (one of my daughter’s favourites) owe very little to the rock and roll formulae they jostled with on Top 40 radio in the late 50s and 60s.
Phil Spector called his two-minute epics ‘little symphonies for the kids’. But where his records sound of their time (and still wonderful), the real symphonies are here. Aided by recording engineer Tom Dowd (who came to Atlantic from working on nuclear reactors), arranger Arif Mardin and Ahmet worked to an imagination all their own. Percussion and violins replace the drums, strings slice on offbeats, a Spanish guitar melody seems like an afterthought, the silken voices twine and intertwine their simple summer snapshot. Nothing is ordinary. It sounds as modern and seductive to an 11-year old in 2007 as it did to me in 1964 and as I suspect it will to an 11-year old in 2017. You can write similar descriptions about any number of Atlantic recordings and artists.

My point is the cultural effect of these records – most directly on competitors such as Stax and Motown, who had to raise their standards to stay in the game, but also on other musicians. The artists who name-check Ray Charles would fill a nightclub. Love for Atlantic made it possible to sign artists as diverse as Yes, Led Zeppelin, Art Blakey, Donny Hathaway, Sonny and Cher, and Sergio Mendes. But what about the indirect effect? Led Zeppelin caused Dave Grohl to play drums and help start Nirvana and then The Foo Fighters; how many musicians have those two bands inspired? Atlantic artists Chic produced artists as diverse as Diana Ross, Duran Duran and Bowie; the bass line of ‘Le Freak’ is the foundation of Queen’s ‘Another One Bites The Dust’; their sampled riffs, licks and beats drive any number of hip hop records.

We are the ultimate benefactors of all this. Our culture is enriched and deepened in ever-increasing ripples that continue through the decades. The Atlantic philosophy was to make the kind of records they wanted to buy, and by doing so Ahmet and his partners made themselves rich financially and us rich culturally. The current record company chiefs and moguls, chasing endless ownership and a diminishing dollar, have forgotten this point. They are in a business whose bottom line is much more than money. It’s the wealth of our spirit.