| Issue #39, December 22, 2006 |
AHMET ERTEGUN, 83
On December 15th, Ahmet Ertegun, co-founder of Atlantic Records and the man who brought the music of Ray Charles, Bobby Darin, Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, Otis Redding, Bette Midler, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Booker T. and the MGs, Sam and Dave, Cream, the Bee Gees, Led Zeppelin, the Coasters, John Coltrane, Charlie Mingus, Roberta Flack, the Spinners, the Allman Brothers, Genesis, Foreigner, Pete Townshend, Stevie Nicks, Buffalo Springfield, the Blues Brothers, Tori Amos, Phil Collins, and the Three Tenors (Placido Domingo, Jose Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti) to our ears, passed away.
By the time of his death, Ahmet Ertegun had been named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress, received a President’s Icon Award (the Grammy Award’s answer to the Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award) and had been depicted in the Hollywood films Beyond The Sea and Ray, both focusing on the rise of stars that he brought into the spotlight.
Ertegun was upheld as a model of a successful man both in the United States and in Turkey, his home country. Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, while attending Ertegun’s funeral in Istanbul on December 18, said that Ertegun “performed a great service for the Turkish people.” And that “his death leaves a great emptiness.” David Geffen, a fellow music mogul, believed that “few people have had a bigger impact on the record industry than Ahmet.” And Rolling Stone founder Jan Wenner named Ahmet Ertegun as the “most revered, respected figure in American popular music of the modern era.”
Ahmet Ertegun’s influence on the American music industry began in 1947, when 24-year-old Ahmet and his friend, Herb Abramson, borrowed $10,000 from the Ertegun’s family dentist to start Atlantic records. As the well-traveled son of Mehmet Munir, a Turkish diplomat and legal advisor to the founder of modern Turkey, Ertegun was immediately successful and quickly became a legend in the music world. Ertegun is credited as being one of the first record executives to market African-American artists as mainstream musical acts in the 1950s and 1960s. Jazz greats such as Charlie Mingus and John Coltrane would have never had the chance to prove their talents had they not been chosen by Ertegun to make records for Atlantic.
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Ahmet Ertegun fell into a coma after falling at a Rolling Stones concert on October 29 at the Beacon Theater in New York, and passed away at New York Presbyterian hospital on December 15 without regaining conciousness. Ahmet Ertegun is survived by his wife, Mica and his sister.
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