There would have been a Ray Charles without Ahmet Ertegun — such genius always breaks through — but it is difficult to know how long it might otherwise have taken the blind singer to find his market.
Charles landed his first big contract with Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records. “I heard a couple of records he made for a small company in California called Swing Time,” Ertegun told Charlie Rose on his nightly show last week. “And I thought that was the best singer I’ve ever heard. And I told everybody, this is the greatest singer.
Unbelievable. He’s a great pianist, a fabulous singer.” In short order, Ertegun signed Charles and the rest is a history that ended with Charles’ death last year, eight Grammys for his album and possibly an Oscar for the dead-reckoning portrayal of the blind singer in the movie “Ray.”
Ertegun revealed more about America’s twisted approach to popular music than could be found elsewhere during Black History Month.
As the son of a Turkish diplomat, young Ertegun had explored jazz with his older brother when his family lived in London and Paris during the 1930s. He heard big bands of Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington at the Palladium and was “dumbfounded” at the richness of jazz.
When his father was assigned to Washington, Ertegun went in search of this great music there. The biggest record shop in D.C., however, had not a single record by Louis Armstrong. “It was a lily-white record shop that only sold pop music,” he recalled to Rose. “No black music.”
A kindly little shopkeeper directed him to a shop on 7th Street near the Howard Theater that, like the Apollo, was a stop on the black circuit for jazz musicians. There he met Chick Webb and his teenage vocalist, Ella Fitzgerald, and got the first autograph ever requested of her.
After attending the jazz clubs on Saturday night, Ertegun’s father would invite the bands for a Sunday afternoon jam session at the Turkish Embassy. Players from the bands of Ellington and Armstrong, Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey would perform; sometimes the black and white musicians would play together — a taboo in America of the 1930s.
The music that blacks played and recorded was segregated in concert halls and record shops as “race music.” Ertegun capitalized on the white suppression of the black market. He started Atlantic Records in 1947 and scored big money right away by making records for the black market.
“It’s the music which I loved, because basically rhythm and blues music and jazz music are very close. And rhythm and blues music has become rock ‘n’ roll, but there’s a part of it which is, you know, people like Ray Charles, people like Fats Domino, people like Chuck Berry are very close to jazz.”
African-Americans are the spine of the music that Ertegun considers the only universal music. “American black music is the fountainhead of all the 20th-century pop music,” he said. “Black music became the music of the world. Every country has wonderful music. . . . But there’s only one music that travels everywhere. And that is black American music.”
Ertegun told Rose he didn’t know exactly what was so magical about African-Americans’ music. When pressed, Ertegun offered that perhaps it was “the chord changes that make a soul kind of music emerge.”
He is doubtlessly onto something because years after King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton launched jazz, John Coltrane was said to play chord changes on his saxophone with such sophistication that other musicians would drop everything for the chance to play with him.
“Of course, jazz has become much more cerebral as time passes,” Ertegun said. Just as the white Dixieland bands lifted from the black New Orleans groups, Ertegun said that the white pop players over the decades have simply borrowed, in some cases without attributions. “I really think of all this music as basically black American music. The music of rock ‘n’ rollers, like Led Zeppelin and like the Rolling Stones, like the Beatles, the Who, I think that’s an imitation of black music.”
A perplexed Charlie Rose asked, “Who would Eric Clapton as a guitarist look to as (the) person that he modeled himself after?” Ertegun shot back, “B.B. King.” He then recalled a scene in a London club. “There was some sort of a pickup group playing” and “I heard this guitar I thought (sounded) like B.B. King. And that’s incredible . . . nobody in England can play like that . . . this kid with an angelic face, his eyes closed, and just playing. And I said, ‘My God, who is that?’ And that was 17- or 18-year-old Eric Clapton.”
At any rate, this son of a Turkish diplomat has played a key role in cutting through entrenched American racism to promote the jazz that he loves, a music that endures as the most original art form created in this ex-slave republic.