The Last Sultan: the Life and Times of Ahmet Ertegun

Robert Greenfield

★ ★ ★

This man was utterly amazing.... Born in Istanbul, in 1923, to a man of status who later became Turkish Consulate of Switzerland, France, and the U.S., Ahmet gave up the wealth & privilege in order to pursue his dream of making Jazz recordings of lesser known (but no less brilliant) jazz musicians & singers.

The book also describes how Ahmet jointly founded Atlantic Records the company over which he long presided and his affinities and extensive knowledge of jazz and blues; however what Ahmet did not know about actually running a record company was amazing.

Ahmet founded Atlantic in 1947 with Herb Abramson, who had a degree in dentistry but preferred the music business. Together they toured the South on the hunt for talent, though they well knew that they were not the first to do so. One of their early discoveries, in 1953, was Ray Charles, who had already been making records but wound up on the Atlantic label.

What I found interesting was the fact that his father was powerful enough to stop MGM from making a film out of Franz Werfel’s “Forty Days of Musa Dagh,” an impassioned novel about the Turkish mass killings of Armenians during World War I. (Turkey has adamantly rejected the label of genocide). Ahmet in his later years considered making a public acknowledgment of Turkey’s role in the massacre as a way of reducing the stigma attached to it, but he never got the chance.

Unfortunately, much of the book was boring, as it covers in detail business deals, other record-business books and is filled w/ musicians & other people not widely known outside the music world.