Atlantic Records - Nesuhi Ertegun

Nesuhi Ertegun

Ahmet's older brother Nesuhi was recruited to the label in January 1955. He had been living in Los Angeles for several years and had only irregular contact with his younger brother, but when Ahmet learned that Nesuhi had been offered a partnership in Atlantic's rival Imperial Records, he and Wexler convinced Nesuhi to join Atlantic instead. Nesuhi headed the label's jazz division and built a strong roster, signing West Coast jazzers Shorty Rogers, Jimmy Giuffre, Herbie Mann and Les McCann, as well as Charles Mingus, John Coltrane and the Modern Jazz Quartet, who became a mainstay of the label, releasing twenty albums; by 1958 Atlantic was America's second-largest independent jazz label. Nesuhi was also in charge of LP album production, a market that was beginning to take off, and he was credited with greatly improving the packaging, production and originality of Atlantic's LP line. He soon deleted the old '100' and '400' series of 10" albums and the earlier 12" albums in Atlantic's catalog, launching the new '1200' series, which sold for $4.98, with Shorty Rogers' The Swingin' Mr Rogers (Atlantic 1212). In 1956 he started the '8000' popular series (selling for $3.98) for the label's few R&B albums, reserving the 1200 series for jazz. Joel Dorn became Nesuhi's assistant following his successful production of Hubert Laws' The Laws of Jazz.