Abramson was working in Washington when he became part of Ahmet and Nesuhi’s social circle. He then helped them put on their early concerts in the nation’s capital. Knowing he was about to be drafted into the army, Abramson left his job and returned to New York to live with his mother until he was called up for service. It was there he met and began keeping company with Miriam Kahan, another ardent jazz fan from Brooklyn. Seven years younger than Abramson, she had also graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and had worked as a proofreader for G. P. Putnam’s Sons and advertising agencies before being employed as a bookkeeper at Hearn’s, a large department store on 14th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues where “a lot of very prominent people worked part-time for a while.”
Drafted into the army in 1944, Abramson, who much like Ahmet had no desire whatsoever to serve in the military, “tried desperately to get out.” After being ordered to climb an eighteen-foot-high pole to install a telephone wire one day, Abramson fell to the bottom only to be ordered to climb it again so he would not lose his nerve. Replying, “I already lost my nerve,” Abramson “ran five miles without stopping because the place where you signed up for medical education in the army was closing at five o’clock, and he put his foot in the door.”
Selected for the Army Specialized Training Program because of his premed background, Abramson was sent back to NYU, where he enrolled in an accelerated dentistry program. To avail himself of the extra $50 a week granted by the army to wedded students in the program, Abramson married Miriam in the fall of 1945. The couple went to Washington, D.C., on their honeymoon to see some of Abramson’s old friends but when Abramson called Ahmet, he was, in Miriam’s words, “very late in calling us back because his father was ill. That was the illness that became fatal.”
Discharged from the army in 1946, Abramson, who “did a lot of things part-time,” continued his dental studies while working as a talent scout for Al Green, the long-haired, hard-drinking character who ran National Records. After becoming head of A&R (artists and repertoire) at the label, Abramson recorded Billy Eckstine, Joe Turner, the Ames Brothers, the Ravens, Pete Johnson, and Charlie Ventura. Abramson’s two biggest hits on National were Dusty Fletcher’s version of “Open the Door, Richard” and “Sioux City Sue” by Dick Thomas.
In 1947, Abramson graduated from NYU with a doctor of dental science degree as an endodontist, but as Barbara Abramson would later say, “He didn’t like dentistry. I asked him why and he said, ‘Because I never saw a hip filling.’ ” In the words of his first wife, Miriam, Abramson had “a different kind of mind. He could cook. He could build. Herb could do anything. He really could.”
Before the year was out, however, Abramson decided he could no longer work for Green. “The reason Herb left National,” Barbara Abramson explained, “was because Al Green did not want to deal with female artists if he could avoid it. He said they were too much trouble. When Billy Eckstine brought in Sarah Vaughan, he said, ‘No broads. No broads.’ At that point, Herb felt he had to move on.”
Abramson then founded the Jubilee label, on which he released two gospel recordings. Because “his heart was in jazz and blues,” Abramson sold his interest in the label to his partner, Jerry Blaine, in return for his original $2,500 investment. While Ahmet never failed to praise Herb Abramson for the role he played in the creation of their new record label, his new partner also brought more than just a shared interest in black roots music and hands-on experience in actually making records to the venture.
By the middle of 1947 when the two men were actively working to start their new company, the American Federation of Musicians had already announced plans to go out on strike on January 1, 1948, and so had ceased granting any new recording licenses. “Atlantic was formed on Herb’s charter from Jubilee,” Barbara Abramson would later say. “It could not have been established without the charter because they weren’t issuing any more. Herb was the only experienced founding partner.”
By then, Abramson, in Ahmet’s words, already “knew all the aspects of the music business which I didn’t know: how to get a lawyer, how to write a contract, what the going rate of pay was, how to sell records . . . he knew where to get pressings and we didn’t press at National because Herb knew it wasn’t a very clean operation. They used to press one for you, one for me.”
While the license was essential, the new company could not have been created if Ahmet had not managed to find the money to bankroll the label. The way in which he did so has since become a cornerstone of the Atlantic Records story as well as an essential part of Ahmet’s legend. As rock critic Ellen Sander would later write, “Ahmet was such a bullshitter that his dentist couldn’t get him to shut up long enough to drill his teeth. At one point he was telling stories of his success in picking and reselling those rare old 78s and the dentist got talked into lending him some money to start Atlantic Records.”
Now perfectly willing to accept help from his father’s friends, Ahmet had approached some of them for financial backing but, “They all knew my background and refused to show any confidence whatsoever in my ever being able to run any kind of business. Finally, in desperation, I turned to my dentist, Dr. Vahdi Sabit, who actually fell for the line I was peddling at the time, which was something like, ‘If we could only sell one record to each record shop . . .’ He turned out to be a gambler and mortgaged his house in order to put up the $10,000 that we needed, became a partner with Herb and myself, and we started recording in 1947.”
Related by marriage to the previous Turkish ambassador, Dr. Vahdi Sabit had been part of Ahmet’s social circle and regularly came to Sunday lunch at the embassy. As Ahmet’s sister would later say, “We all went to him for our teeth and he wouldn’t ask for any money. My parents would say, ‘No, let us pay you,’ and he wouldn’t accept it. And then after my father died, he suddenly presented us with a huge bill.” Although the family liked Dr. Sabit, they also “thought he was a little nuts. But he was fun and he was funny. I don’t think he understood music. He was a gambler. If he hadn’t been a gambler, he never would have given Ahmet that money.”
Nor did Sabit come up with his entire investment before the label began operating. As Barbara Abramson recalled, “Over a two-and-a-half-year period, Dr. Sabit paid bills when they couldn’t be met like rent and light bills, electricity bills. He did not extend the money in a lump sum. The reason he invested at all was that he had been apprised of Herb’s prior track record. Like Sabit, Herb was also an educated man, a dentist. So Dr. Sabit came in as a limited partner and there was a time period during which he could be bought out.”
In a letter to his sister during the spring of 1948, Ahmet wrote, “Dr. Sabit hasn’t been able to sell his house yet, and therefore is in a bad situation financially. That is why I was unable to pay off some of our debts with the $300 you sent me but had to use it for our own expenses. We put a lot of money into this business and should be able to get returns on it soon. Originally Dr. Sabit said he would put in $12,000, but due to the house not being sold, he is in a difficult position. We will repay you the $300 as soon as possible.”
On December 31, 1947, Sabit, Abramson, and Ahmet signed a contract consisting of three typewritten pages with five line-outs and two addendums that each partner initialed six separate times. All three parties, with Sabit in first position as the major investor, agreed to form a stock corporation pursuant to the laws of the state of New York known as Horizon Records, Inc. Crossed out by hand, this name was replaced by the Atlantic Recording Corporation.
As Ahmet would later say, “The name Atlantic was probably about our eightieth choice, because every name we came up with—Horizon, Blue Moods, all kind of names like that—had already been taken. We’d call the union and the union would say, ‘We already have a record company registered by that name.’ I’d heard of a label that called themselves Pacific Jazz at that time. So in desperation, I said, ‘Look, they call themselves Pacific; let’s call ourselves Atlantic.’ That’s how that happened. I
t wasn’t a name we were crazy about—it was so generic. There are so many Atlantics, A&P and all of that, but finally we said, who cares what we call it?”
The contract also stipulated that fifty of the company’s one hundred shares would be given to Sabit in return for his payment of $12,500. Ten shares of stock were issued to Herb Abramson for his payment of $2,500. In return for services rendered to the corporation, Herb Abramson received an additional twenty shares. Ahmet was given nineteen shares with the remaining share going to Sabit. Because they would be “active in promotional and other endeavors on behalf of the corporation,” Abramson and Ahmet would each receive $40 a week for expenses in return for expending thirty (the word “forty” having been crossed out) hours a week in such endeavors.
At the end of each year, all parties would receive an equal bonus from one half of the company’s net profits with the other half to be distributed in accordance to the shares they owned. Abramson was named as the president of the company with Ahmet as vice president and secretary, and Dr. Sabit as treasurer as well as chairman of a board of directors, which consisted of the three men and two other members they would elect.
The first incarnation of the company’s record label was a red and black circle with the long, red, skinny legs of the “A” in Atlantic stretching down the left side as the remaining letters appeared beside it on an extended red horizontal line on a black background with the name of the title and the artist in black below on a field of red. Depending on who told the story, the “A” itself, which was the label’s most prominent graphic feature, stood either for “Ahmet” or “Abramson.”
On November 21, 1947, more than a month before the partners signed the agreement, Ahmet and Herb Abramson cut their first track on Atlantic with a group called the Harlemaires, who performed “The Rose of the Rio Grande.” Working constantly over the next five weeks in studios like WOR, Beltone, and Apex, Ahmet and Abramson cut sixty-five sides. Even for an established company, this would have been an astonishing number of tracks to record in such a short period of time. As partners in a fledgling label without a name, Abramson and Ahmet were motivated by a sense of utter panic. As Ahmet would later say, “We were grabbing at straws because of the coming strike and we recorded lots of semi-names, unknown artists. . . . We must have spent three or four thousand dollars just making recordings in 1947 without ever releasing anything.”
After the strike began, Ahmet learned to his great chagrin that although he had thought “the major companies would be doing a lot of recording in Europe and we couldn’t afford to do that, ‘Europe’ turned out to be New Jersey because you could go there and record anybody you wanted because the local wasn’t sending anybody to check up. The guys who were used to making scale would come up and say, ‘Hey, listen, we’re willing to record nonunion. . . . Don’t let anybody know and we’ll do it for $25 a session.’ Suddenly, with the strike on, the price went down. All the musicians were scuffling for work.”
Many of the sessions Ahmet and Abramson cut in 1947 were then “just thrown in the garbage because I should have known better and certainly Herb Abramson should have known better. You can’t record a lot of stuff in advance hoping to release it later because later it doesn’t sound so good.” After what proved to be but the first of many decisions by the partners that did not turn out as planned, the real miracle was that Atlantic Records itself managed to survive.
3
To house his new company, Ahmet rented a tiny two-room suite on the ground floor of the Hotel Jefferson, a derelict, broken-down old building at 208 West 56th Street between Seventh Avenue and Broadway that would soon be condemned. Using the living room as the Atlantic Records office, he shared the bedroom with his cousin, a Turkish poet named Sadi Koylan who had upgraded his own living situation by moving from the flophouse where he had formerly resided. The rent on Suite 102 was $60 a week but since the hotel switchboard operator answered all incoming calls, Ahmet did not need to hire a secretary. Songwriters like Doc Pomus and Rudy Toombs soon began dropping by to audition songs.
On January 22, 1948, Nesuhi congratulated his younger brother on having finally launched his own record company by writing, “The name sounds good, label nice. Some of the recordings you made strike me as terribly exciting.” Now running his own small jazz label called Crescent Records from his record shop in Los Angeles that featured New Orleans musicians like the legendary trombonist Kid Ory, Nesuhi counseled Ahmet not to bring out his records too fast so they would have “time to be properly exploited” and added, “Received press release from your publicity man. This, to me, seems to be an unnecessary luxury: I mean the hiring of a PA. I would think that between you and Herb, you could take care of that angle yourselves. Why increase your overhead?”
Far more organized than his younger brother and obsessed with detail, Nesuhi would throughout this period continue sending Ahmet long letters from Los Angeles without ever getting a timely reply or managing to persuade him to heed his advice. Even as Ahmet was sharing a bedroom with his cousin while trying to draw attention to Atlantic’s first releases by having Waxie Maxie play them on his radio show in Washington, he conducted his business exactly like someone who had grown up in incredibly privileged circumstances.
Despite how doggedly Ahmet had worked to find the money to start Atlantic, he was still caught between two worlds, a point reinforced by Nesuhi when he asked, “By the way what happened to your studies? When are you getting your degree, and are you? You are being very foolish to reject your studies; you will bitterly regret it the rest of your life.”
While in many ways Ahmet was still the pampered rich boy he had been brought up to be, he had learned to rely on the kindness of friends to survive. Before starting Atlantic, Ahmet would often come to New York and spend the night on the couch in the living room of the furnished three-room apartment Herb and Miriam Abramson rented for $45 a month at 106 West 13th Street. “Nobody believes this story,” she would later say, “but when I used to go to work in the morning, Ahmet would still be asleep because he had been going to clubs all night and when I came home in the evening, all the sheets and pillow cases were neatly folded on the couch. If you know Ahmet, he was from a privileged background and he had never done any of that. In a way, he was coddled all his life.”
In the words of his old friend Delia Gottlieb, “Ahmet was still very naive. He would say, ‘I don’t have any shirts. I don’t know what to do.’ When I got into the hotel, he had a pile of shirts in the closet he had worn. I said, ‘You know, you’re supposed to take them to the laundry and they wash them for you.’ The servants or his aunt had always taken care of them for him.”
When it came to his own appearance, however, Ahmet was never frugal. “He didn’t have a nickel,” Gottlieb recalled, “and he would say, ‘I need a pair of alligator shoes. I have to order them from Lobb’s.’ Back then, who knew what they cost? He didn’t pay his bills because the gentry don’t do that. But Ahmet was having the time of his life. He liked the music and he knew the music and he understood the people and he had this enormous gift—he could talk to musicians and he could talk to dukes.”
In Miriam Abramson’s words, “Ahmet had been cosseted at the embassy where they had taken care of everything. He didn’t know anything about the practicalities of life. He had all these personal bills and I said, ‘Why don’t you pay these?’ He said, ‘If I pay them, they’ll think I’m closing the account.’ That was what would happen at the embassy because they would keep credit going forever for those people.”
In 1948, Atlantic had some success with two jazz instrumentals, “Old Black Magic” by Tiny Grimes and “The Spider” by Joe Morris, who also recorded “Lowe Groovin’,” which then became the theme song for Washington R&B radio deejay Jack Lowe Endler, known to his listeners as Jackson Lowe. In November, Ahmet produced “Midnight Special” by Morris and the song went to number twelve on what was then known as The Billboard Juke Box chart. The money on which Ahmet was living however did not come f
rom record sales but regular payments his mother sent him from Turkey.
Although an American dollar then cost nearly four times as much on the black market in Turkey than it was worth in the United States, Ahmet’s mother continued raising money to settle family debts in America by “selling most of the things” she had brought with her from Washington. “I only hope,” Selma wrote, “you haven’t been annoyed by angry creditors too much. It is some comfort to think that sort of thing never bothered you so much as it does me.” Ignoring the bills, Ahmet was in fact using the money to keep Atlantic going.
He was also keeping company with Mynell Allen, a black vocalist with the Sam Donahue Orchestra, who, in Miriam Abramson’s words, was “very sweet and not very pretty. A lovely woman. I think he was more interested in Ginnie Powell with the Boyd Raeburn band. What was interesting considering Ahmet’s background and education was that I don’t think he’d had much success with girls. He was beautifully educated with wonderful manners but rather shy and when he first came from Washington, he had an inferiority complex about girls. But that faded fast.”
With the Hotel Jefferson about to be knocked down so the Mutual of New York building could be built on the site, Ahmet and Herb Abramson were forced to move the Atlantic office to a tenement building at 301 West 54th Street just around the corner from Stillman’s Gym, the center of the boxing universe in the city. Located above a storefront, the office had no desks so Herb and Miriam Abramson bought a used partner’s desk, which Abramson then refinished because, in her words, “He could do everything, and that was our furniture.”
The Last Sultan Page 7