A fellow aficionado with whom they crossed paths was a dental student and record-label entrepreneur named Herb Abramson. Abramson had been involved with the National and Jubilee labels, where he’d worked with Billy Eckstine, Big Joe Turner and others.
Ahmet Ertegun was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student in 1947 when he obtained a loan from his family’s dentist and founded Atlantic Records with Abramson. Initially, he ran operations out of his apartment in the Jefferson Hotel on Fifty-sixth Street in New York.
Ertegun was dapper and urbane, equally at home in either high-culture circles or the ballrooms of Harlem. He customarily dressed in blazers and slacks and wore a goatee and glasses. As Atlantic grew, he attracted people with a similarly broad experience of the musical world. Engineer Tom Dowd joined the Atlantic team on its second recording session. Dowd, the son of classical-music professionals, was involved with nearly every Atlantic session held over the next twenty-plus years. Jesse Stone, who had led territory bands in the Kansas City area as far back as 1918 and then led the stage band at the Apollo in Harlem, came on board as a staff arranger, as did Eckstine veteran Budd Johnson.
The fledgling label had some credible chart successes with jump-band cuts by Tiny Grimes, Joe Morris and others. It wasn’t until 1949, however, that it had the kind of hit that could establish some momentum. Stick McGhee, the brother of blues singer Brownie McGee, cut “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” a raucous boogie with a small rhythm section, and brought Atlantic impressive sales.
The exact midpoint of the twentieth century was an interesting time for American popular culture. Fifty-second Street, which had complimented Broadway since the early thirties as perhaps the country’s most important show-business environment, was in decline. Its main two-block stretch had been home to clubs that had spawned many of the world’s great pop singers, jazz musicians, comedians, dancers, composers, song pluggers. Now vice was setting in. The same thing was happening up in Harlem and in the black sections of other American cities where musical ferment had been a major part of those communities’ vitality. At the same time, a new breed of nightlife creature, the hipster, was beginning to populate the worlds of music, literature and other arts. To further complicate the picture, the hipsters were divided about whether all black music of the moment was equally valid, or whether progressive jazz or blues-based dance music had more merit. (See last week’s article on this site, “R&B, Jazz, and Questions of Standards and Taste.”)
