Ahmet Ertegun vs. Clive Davis FITE!

Clive I can't stand - the guy oozes snake-oil salesman and his taste is for shit. Ertegun, however, seems like a very hep cat, I'd say from what I know of each of these figures, he comes out smelling the cleanest.

Hit Men is what I think you're talking about. There's also the modestly-titled Clive, which I have not had the pleasure of reading.

As for the coolest exec, I go w/ the WB crowd: Mo Ostin, Lenny Waronker, etc. Don't tell that to Prince, though...

Another great industry book is Mansion on the Hill.

Bisexual, you say?

what the

no way

http://variety.com/2017/music/news/sexual-harassment-music-industry-dorothy-carvello-1202591488/

Who is the coolest major label record exec ever?

The combo of Ostin/Waronker, surely.

x-post-- that's terrible.

Very

yeah i’m still taking this in

it’s one thing to know that it happens, it’s quite another to hear the firsthand story

Excerpt from her book.

https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/8468359/anything-for-a-hit-book-excerpt-atlantic-records-dorothy-carvello

And related interview

https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/magazine-feature/8468365/dorothy-carvello-anything-for-a-hit-book-interview

Definitely gonna read that one. (I never met Ertegun, but I visited his old office, which was maintained as a shrine of sorts at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, when I worked for Atlantic. Now that all of Warner Music is in a different building a few blocks over, I guess they just boxed up all the photos of him with everybody you've ever heard of in your life, etc.)

Before Ertegun lived in NYC, he was a teen living in segregated Washington DC but at the Turkish embassy where his father was the Turkish ambassador to the US. A movie doc about this 1935 to 1944 era called "Leave the Door Open" is now out.

"Leave the Door Open" is showing live at 4 pm today Sunday at the Arlington, VA Cinema and Drafthouse (with a panel discussion) and will be shown online as part of the DC Independent film festival for a charge (you have to pay around $22 for the whole festival). It is a movie doc about when the teenaged Ertegun sons who had been sneaking out to the Howard Theatre & Waxie Maxies at 7th & T, began setting up integrated jazz jam sessions at their home embassy residence as their father was the ambassador from Turkey; and a concert at the DC JCC, despite DC being segregated, and some white folks opposing their efforts. They lived in DC from around 1935 to 1944. The movie doc is focused only on their time in DC and uses older interviews with both brothers who passed away years back.

https://dciff-indie.org/leave-the-door-open/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/these-turkish-brothers-found-their-calling-in-dc-championing-the-black-music-scene/2021/01/19/3642e8f8-34e8-11eb-a997-1f4c53d2a747_story.html

[i[As teenagers, Ahmet and Nesuhi were smitten by jazz when they heard Duke Ellington play in London and were excited about moving to his hometown. But when they arrived, they were disappointed to find how racially segregated the city was. “When I first came to Washington, the stores downtown didn’t carry any jazz records or blues records,” Ahmet said in a 2002 interview. “I had to go to the Black section of Washington for the shops that sold records of the music we wanted to buy.”

He visited jazz clubs on U Street and record shops on Seventh Street, and became a regular at Waxie Maxie, the music shop owned by Max Silverman, who built the store into a leading music retail chain. There, Ertegun found other jazz fans, such as Washington Post photographer and reporter Bill Gottlieb, later a writer for the influential Down Beat music magazine, and Billy Taylor, who would go on to become a bandleader and for decades directed jazz at the Kennedy Center....Historian Maurice Jackson described to Safter an Ertegun-organized concert at the Jewish community center: “Two Muslim brothers bringing Black music to the center belonging to our Jewish brothers and sisters. This is historic.”[/i]

https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/513681/city-lights-leave-the-door-open-dciff/

W/R/T the original question, Ertegun for sure, but Clive Davis gets a ton of credit for shoveling money at Miles Davis while he was still at Columbia, and for signing (or approving the signing of) Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake and Muhal Richard Abrams when Arista had a jazz division in the 1970s.