Ahmet Ertegun; was midwife to birth of rock 'n' roll; at 83

Ahmet Ertegun -- who helped change the music the world listened to, thanks to his stewardship of Atlantic Records, a driving force in the emergence of rhythm & blues and rock 'n' roll -- died yesterday. He was 83.

Mr. Ertegun had been in a coma since suffering a fall Oct. 29 at a Rolling Stones concert celebrating Bill Clinton's 60th birthday. He died at New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center.

"Here was a man who combined substance and style like no one else," said Lyor Cohen, chief executive of US recorded music at Warner Music Group Corp., parent of Atlantic Records.

"Ahmet was perhaps the most revered, respected figure in American popular music of the modern era," Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner said in a statement. "He had the regard of the musicians in a way no other executive has ever had, because of his own deep musicality and abilities and his legendary appetite for the music life."

Among those who recorded on Atlantic and the labels it distributed were Ray Charles; Big Joe Turner; Ruth Brown; the Drifters; the Coasters; Otis Redding; Buffalo Springfield; Aretha Franklin; Cream; Crosby, Stills & Nash; Led Zeppelin; and the Rolling Stones.

More than 25 artists who recorded on Atlantic or Atlantic-distributed labels are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That's almost twice the number of the next best-represented record company. The hall's main exhibition space is named after Mr. Ertegun, a 1987 inductee.

That same year, Mr. Ertegun was also inducted into the Best Dressed Hall of Fame. Part of the mystique surrounding him lay in his impeccably tailored refinement and cosmopolitan manner.

Mr. Ertegun was "an aristocrat for whom slumming was transcendence," Time magazine's Richard Corliss once wrote.

A classic bon vivant, Mr. Ertegun carried himself with the panache of a Foreign Service officer. (In fact, his father served as Turkish ambassador to the United States.)

Mr. Ertegun and his wife, Mica, a leading New York interior decorator, were pillars of Manhattan high society. Their presence at an event ensured its fashionableness.

Mr. Ertegun, the legendary Atlantic recording engineer Tom Dowd once said, "doesn't crash a party; he manufactures one."

Bald, bespectacled, sleepy-eyed, goateed, Mr. Ertegun looked like a cross between an actuary and a satyr. Yet his looks masked a bewitching personal style that made him equally at home with dowagers and blues singers, Henry Kissinger and Mick Jagger.

"The thing about Ahmet," Jagger told The (London) Times in 1988, "he is an all-around record man. He has the authenticity that other record people don't have."

Atlantic was founded in 1947. In that era, there were numerous small independent labels specializing in so-called race music : Imperial, Peacock, Specialty, Federal, King. What set Atlantic apart was Mr. Ertegun's deep feeling for African-American music, an appreciation verging on connoisseurship.

"American black music," he said on the PBS program "Charlie Rose" in 2005, "is the fountainhead of all 20th-century pop music."

More than anything else, perhaps, Mr. Ertegun was a musical enthusiast. His passion and respect for African-American music were the foundation of Atlantic's success. "At the heart of his achievement," a 1978 New Yorker magazine profile suggested, were "the rhythms of infatuation smartly expressed."

Jerry Wexler, Mr. Ertegun's partner at Atlantic and himself a larger-than-life musical figure, saw such enthusiasm as central to the label's success. Atlantic "worked very well in the studio and in the office because the affirmative prevailed," he told Dorothy Wade and Justine Picardie in their 1990 biography of Mr. Ertegun, "Music Man."

When Mr. Ertegun co-founded Atlantic, he didn't just start a business. He embarked on a vocation.

Not only did he oversee the label's business dealings and produce records, he wrote songs under the pseudonym Ahmet Nugetre (his surname reversed), including Joe Turner's "Chains of Love" and Ray Charles's "Mess Around." He and Wexler even sang backup on Turner's "Shake, Rattle, and Roll."

Mr. Ertegun saw to it that Atlantic made the transition to post-British Invasion rock. Bobby Darin, who signed with Atlantic in the late 1950s, was the label's first white act. Others followed: the Bee Gees; the Rascals; Buffalo Springfield; Cream; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Yes; Foreigner; Phil Collins.

Atlantic owned or distributed such labels as Atco, Cotillion, Capricorn, and Stax/Volt. Such Stax/Volt artists as Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, and Booker T. & the MGs, along with Atlantic's own Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, and Percy Sledge, ensured that the label was as important to soul in the 1960s as it had been to R&B in the '50s.

Mr. Ertegun's eye and ear for talent extended beyond performers. He hired a very young Phil Spector as his assistant and persuaded a protégé, David Geffen, to start his own record label, Asylum, under the Atlantic umbrella.

After selling Atlantic for $17 million in 1967 to what is now Time Warner, Mr. Ertegun remained a force in the recording industry. At the time of his death, he was cochairman of the board and co-chief executive of Atlantic

He had no real peers in the recording industry. There were other visionary owners of independent labels who greatly affected postwar American culture: Sam Phillips of Sun Records, which first recorded Elvis Presley; the Chess brothers, whose namesake label recorded Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters; and Berry Gordy of Motown.

Yet none had anywhere near Mr. Ertegun's staying power or his ability to flourish in the brave new corporate world of the 1970s, '80s, and beyond.

Ahmet Munir Ertegun was born in Istanbul on July 31, 1923. His parents were M. Munir Ertegun, a diplomat, and Hayrunisa (Temel) Ertegun. Mr. Ertegun's father held several diplomatic posts in Europe and was sent to Washington, D.C., when his son was 12.

A year or two earlier, while living in London, Mr. Ertegun went with his brother to hear the Duke Ellington Orchestra. "I was enthralled and astounded," he said in that New Yorker profile, "with the most powerful music I'd ever imagined could exist. . . . It was an unbelievably exciting thing."

During his adolescence, Mr. Ertegun and his older brother Nesuhi amassed a collection of 25,000 blues and jazz records.

While living in Washington, Mr. Ertegun haunted black record stores and the Howard Theater, the prime local venue for African-American performers. He organized Sunday afternoon jam sessions at the Turkish embassy for touring jazz musicians.

Mr. Ertegun earned a bachelor's degree at St. John's College in Annapolis, Md., and did postgraduate work at Georgetown University.

His major interests were musical, though. With an investment of $12,500 from the family dentist, Mr. Ertegun founded Atlantic with a partner, Herb Abramson. (Wexler would later replace Abramson.)

The label's first release was "Rose of the Rio Grande," by the Harlemaires.

Nesuhi Ertegun joined Atlantic in 1955 to head its jazz operation. The label went on to record albums by such leading figures as John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Ornette Coleman.

Great as the impact of Atlantic was on popular music, it would have been vastly greater if Mr. Ertegun had been able to snare two particular acts.

"Jerry Wexler and I loved Elvis," Mr. Ertegun recalled in a 1998 Los Angeles Times interview. "I got real excited and offered $25,000 for [his] contract, which was all the money we had."

Instead, RCA purchased Presley's contract for $45,000. Presley's "music would have been a bit funkier" on Atlantic, Mr. Ertegun suggested. "We wouldn't have gone pop so quickly with him."

The other musical whopper Atlantic almost landed was the Beatles. The lawyer charged with finding an American outlet for the group represented two record labels: Atlantic and a small Chicago-based independent, Vee-Jay. "I don't know to this day why, but he put them on Vee-Jay," Mr. Ertegun lamented to the Times.

Because of problems with royalty payments, the contract lapsed and was snapped up by Capitol Records. "If they had come to us," Mr. Ertegun said, "we never would have let them go."

Mr. Ertegun was the recipient of a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 1993.

Besides music and high society, Mr. Ertegun's other abiding passion was soccer. He served as president of the New York Cosmos soccer team from 1971 to 1983 and was inducted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame in 2003.

Mr. Ertegun will be buried in a private ceremony in his native Turkey, according to Bob Kaus, a spokesman for Ertegun and Atlantic Records. A memorial service will be held in New York after New Year's. He leaves his wife.

Material from the Associated Press was used in this obituary.