The Turkish Tycoons of "Soul"

It was a crisis in domestic diplomacy for Turkey's Ambassador to the U.S., Mehmet Munir Ertegun. His sons Nesuhi and Ahmet had conceived a most un-Turkish enthusiasm for caz and yaniturku -- Turkish for the jazz and blues music of the American Negro.

Their rooms overflowed with a collection of 25,000 records. They invited touring musicians to the embassy near Sheridan Circle for noisy Sunday after noon jam sessions. They flouted the racial mores of the day in Washington by staging jazz concerts before mixed audiences. Their mother nervously told friends that the boys were "doing research in American folk music." The ambassador kept telling himself it was a passing fancy.

He was wrong. Today, after 25 years, 49-year-old Nesuhi and 43-year-old Ah met are stronger than ever for caz and yaniturku -- and it is paying off. As president and vice president of Manhattan-based Atlantic Records, they head one of the largest and fastest-growing record firms in the country, and are riding atop the most pervasive pop-music tide in years: the "soul sound."

Searing Conviction. "Soul" combines searing emotional conviction, a surging rhythmic pulse, and earthy-poetic lyrics in updated variations on the Negro blues tradition. Long a staple of the "rhythm and blues" packaged for a chiefly Negro market, soul has increasingly influenced the work of white performers -- notably rock 'n' rollers, many of whom frankly imitate Negro originals. Now, after the success of such Negro singers as Lou Rawls and Dionne Warwick, the authentic soul sound has come into its own in the white, teen-dominated pop market. "It satisfies a thirst for the idiomatic, the untrammeled, the pure," explains Atlantic's other vice president and co-owner, Jer ry Wexler, 50. "After all that farina and honey, the audience wants some cornbread and butter."

Atlantic has it, and has had it for 20 years. Although Atlantic also does pop (Sonny & Cher, Bobby Darin) and jazz (Charles Lloyd, Modern Jazz Quartet), two-thirds of its single releases and half of its albums feature such soulers as Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, and -- on its associate Memphis label, Stax -- Otis Redding and Carla Thomas. Thanks mainly to their vibrant, visceral performances, Atlantic this year has produced six singles that have sold a million copies apiece, and two of its albums have grossed $1,000,-000. Last month it had 18 disks among the 100 bestselling singles, an alltime industry record. Its total sales are now running 50% ahead of last year and more than 500% of five years ago.

Freewheeling Sessions. All of which makes for a handsome return (just how much they decline to say) on what began as an expensive hobby for the Erteguns. They stayed in the U.S. after their father's death in 1944 to pursue advanced degrees, Nesuhi planning to return to Turkey as a journalist, Ahmet as a teacher. But Nesuhi gravitated into a career on the West Coast that included editing a record magazine, producing jazz albums and teaching a course on jazz at U.C.L.A. And Ahmet could not resist a "short-term" recording project in 1948. That was the beginning of Atlantic. Before long he had signed Joe Turner, LaVern Baker and the great Ray Charles. Wexler went with the firm in 1953 and Nesuhi joined the following year (the brothers eventually became U.S. citizens). All three men take a hand in most of the com pany's freewheeling recording sessions --writing a tune or lyric, working out an instrumental background as they go along. "We're not business people," says Wexler, "but music people."

But they are business people enough to spot a vast new market opening up. Foreign sales, sparked by a great enthusiasm for Negro blues in Europe, have gone from practically nothing two years ago to a quarter of Atlantic's volume. "Blues music is so simple, sincere and beautiful that it has a universal audience," says Ahmet. "It's the only international pop music in the world."

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