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thought he might play them for his friend John Hammond, running artists and repertoire (a&r) at Mercury Records with Mitch Miller—but his partner made off with the masters.
    Ahmet talked Waxie Maxie Silverman into bankrolling his next recording venture, but this time Ahmet brought along somebody who had actually made records before, Herb Abramson, a record collectorAhmet had known since the embassy jam sessions. Abramson, working in A&R at National Records while studying dentistry at New York University under a grant from the army, was also a fashionable, handsome man-about-town. He had the added attraction of having made genuine records with Billy Eckstine, the Ravens, and Big Joe Turner, among others. Ertegun and Abramson were going to start two labels, Quality and Jubilee, one for jazz and the other for gospel, but didn’t get much further than cutting a couple of records that went nowhere. Abramson soldiered on with a new partner in Jubilee, bandleader Jerry Blaine, who wanted to make Jewish comedy records, but soon sold out.
    Ahmet still wanted to start a label and make records. He buttonholed bandleader Lionel Hampton about raising money for a label, and the jazzman agreed, only to have his wife scotch the deal. Instead, Ahmet approached an Ertegun family friend, their dentist, Dr. Vahdi Sabit, who mortgaged his house and came up with $10,000 to back the play. Ahmet moved to New York and slept on the Abramsons’ living room couch. They changed the name of the company to Atlantic Records at the last minute after they discovered that the name Horizon Records had already been taken. They crossed out “Horizon” and wrote in “Atlantic” on the partnership papers. Abramson was named president; Ahmet vice president. Herb’s wife Miriam, also named vice president, managed the office and handled the accounting. The first session was conducted November 21, 1947, by a quartet called the Harlemaires, a vocal group they found through arranger Jesse Stone. Ahmet thought the gambit might last a couple of years.
    Ahmet could not have predicted the cataclysmic musical and social tides that were going to sweep the label’s artists and records in only a few years into the foreground of American popular music. He didn’t even know how to make records; that was what Abramson was around to do. He was a slick hipster trying to make his hustle work. He was smart, educated, cultured, but the independent record game was no place for pantywaists and Ahmet wasn’t one of those either. Still, thereis no way he could have envisioned for himself the kind of success he would experience in very short order. Although the label would come to define the rhythm and blues era and Ahmet’s innate taste, elegance and sophistication never stood in the way of his deep appreciation of the funky blues—rather just the opposite—Atlantic did not start out with a program, a strategy, or even a specific kind of record the label intended to pursue.
    In the first year, they made a variety of records. With ex–Lionel Hampton trumpeter Joe Morris, they cut “Lowe Groovin’,” an instrumental named after a Washington, DC, disc jockey that did well, aided by considerable airplay from the deejay in question, Jackson Lowe, and Ahmet’s old pal, Waxie Maxie Silverman, who played the record on the radio show he sponsored in exchange for free goods for his store. They recorded jazz pianist Erroll Garner. “Blue Harlem” by Tiny Grimes blared out of ghetto jukeboxes all over New York City. Ahmet learned well all those afternoons in Waxie Maxie’s that customers didn’t want fancy jazz; they wanted down and dirty blues records they could dance to. The company rented a $65-a-month ground-floor suite at the Hotel Jefferson on Fifty-Sixth Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue. Ahmet shared the bedroom with a Turkish poet and cousin who hung out with the Greenwich Village crowd, while the record company operated out of the other room. The hotel