Ahmet Ertegun's story starts in a strange place for a jazz legend: he was the son of a Turkish diplomat, raised partly in Washington D.C., obsessed with American records he and his brother Nesuhi Ertegun collected as teenagers. That collecting habit turned into a career. In 1947 Ahmet co-founded Atlantic Records with Herb Abramson, using a few thousand dollars borrowed from his family dentist. It sounds like a joke, but it became the label that gave a home to Ray Charles, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and later Aretha Franklin and a long list of rock and soul giants.

What made Ertegun different from other label owners wasn't just business sense, it was taste. He actually knew the music. He'd sit in on sessions, argue about takes, occasionally write songs himself under the pen name A. Nugetre (his last name backwards), and he had enough respect for the artists that people like Mingus and Coltrane trusted him to leave them alone when it mattered. Coltrane's Giant Steps (1960) came out on Atlantic during Ertegun's watch, as did Mingus's run of records that helped define what hard bop and soul jazz could sound like when nobody was rushing the band out the door.

His brother Nesuhi deserves equal credit here, honestly — Nesuhi ran Atlantic's jazz division with real rigor and is the reason the label's jazz catalog has the depth it does. Ahmet was more the dealmaker, the guy with the ear for crossover and the charm to keep volatile personalities in the building. But that split worked. Atlantic became a place where jazz could sit next to R&B and gospel-inflected soul without anyone treating it as a lesser cousin, and that mixing of worlds is part of why the label's sound feels so alive even now.

Ertegun wasn't a saint and he wasn't a musician, so it's fair to say his contribution is a different kind than the artists he recorded. He didn't invent a style or redefine an instrument. What he did was build the room where other people could do that, and then have the sense to get out of the way and press record. That's a less flashy kind of genius, but talk to anyone who worked at Atlantic in the fifties and sixties and they'll tell you it mattered just as much as any solo.

He died in 2006 after complications from a fall at a Rolling Stones concert, which is a strange, almost fitting footnote for a man who spent his whole life standing just offstage, close to the music but never quite in the spotlight himself.