Jerry Wexler, Famed Record Producer, Dies at 91
5 minutes ago



NEW YORK - Legendary record producer Jerry Wexler, who helped shape R&B music with influential recordings of Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and other greats, has died, says his co-author, David Ritz. He was 91.


Ritz, co-author of Wexler's 1993 memoir, "Rhythm and the Blues," said he died at his Sarasota, Fla., home at about 3:45 a.m. Friday. He had been ill for a couple of years with congenital heart disease.

Wexler earned his reputation as a music industry giant while a partner at Atlantic Records.

Atlantic provided an outlet for the groundbreaking work of African-American performers in the 1950s and '60s. Later, it provided a home to rock bands such as Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones.

A real producer.....R.I.P

Rest in peace, Jerry. You deserve a break. Thanks for the memories.

Glad he was able to live a long life. R.I.P.--he was a great producer; definitely one for the history books.

RIP

a great and talented producer indeed

...

Man, these last two weeks have been rough....

Rest in Peace, Jerry....







...

R.I.P.



Man...

Rest In Peace Jerry and 'Thank you' for producing songs that have become part of the soundtrack of my life.

...Rhythm and Blues isn't ain't what it use to be.


[Edited 8/15/08 10:56am]

StarMon said:

It's still around, they're just calling it "soul blues" now.

Timmy84 said:

Timmy eighty-four "soul blues" I wonder what were his thoughts on Soul Blues

Rest in Peace 'Wex You,"Omlette" and Tommy workin' the big board in the sky

IAintTheOne said:

Ahmet, Jerry and Tom reunited in heaven.

IAintTheOne said:

Some quality sounds.

StarMon said:

...Rhythm and Blues ain't ....period



no such thang these days....

Graycap23 said:

Yep.

R.I.P.

funkpill said:

What's the haps pill...

I agree, I was just thinking since Wexler coined the phrase Rhythm and Blues
what was his take on the current state of.....well, whats going down now.

StarMon said:

Or better yet 20yrs ago.

StarMon said:

yup....can dig it

...There are just too many classic R&B records/artists that he's been involved with.

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From a 1993 New York Times aritcle...


The Soul of Jerry Wexler

By LEO SACKS;
Published: August 29, 1993


RHYTHM AND THE BLUES A Life in American Music. By Jerry Wexler and David Ritz. Illustrated. 331 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $25.

LOOKING back on a lifetime in the rough-and-tumble music business, Jerry Wexler still has a nice word for everyone in his memoir, "Rhythm and the Blues." That may be disingenuous of him, but Mr. Wexler, who defined the role of the modern record producer, always was a wily one. He had to be. It required a special kind of cunning to coax artists like Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin into giving their singular visions a universal voice.

Mr. Wexler's passion for music propelled his journey from the Depression-era streets of the Washington Heights section of Manhattan to the executive suite of Atlantic Records downtown. As a writer for Billboard magazine in the late 1940's, Mr. Wexler coined the phrase "rhythm-and-blues" to replace "race music" as the generic label for black popular music. "As a Jew, I didn't think I identified with the underclass," he says in "Rhythm and the Blues," which he wrote with the novelist and biographer David Ritz. "I was the underclass."

Atlantic was a leader in identifying the new musical styles percolating in the world of rhythm-and-blues, and Mr. Wexler was a kindred spirit to the rowdy jazz instrumentalists and blues shouters who were about to reconfigure the pop-music landscape. "I was simmered in a slow-cooking gumbo of New Orleans jazz, small Harlem combos, big bands, Western swing, country, jukebox race music, pop schmaltz," he writes.

Ahmet Ertegun, one of Atlantic's founders, invited Mr. Wexler to join the label as a partner in 1953, and together they transformed rhythm-and-blues into red-hot pop music for the mainstream. Atlantic helped to begin the rock-and-roll revolution when Big Joe Turner's raucous "Shake, Rattle and Roll" literally shook up white teen-age listeners in 1954. The label's deal with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, two witty songwriters and producers, gave birth to the Coasters, a savvy black vocal group whose hit singles like "Yakety Yak" used jaunty saxophones and street-smart humor to mask biting racial satire. And then there was Ray Charles, whose tumultuous fusion of gospel, jazz and blues would energize American popular music and take it in previously unforeseen directions.

As the music changed, so did Mr. Wexler. He made an odd couple with the owlish Ahmet Ertegun, the younger son of Turkey's Ambassador to the United States. Mr. Wexler says that Mr. Ertegun -- cultured and literate, the antithesis of the cigar-smoking music business stereotype -- made him do the dirty work. When the Manhattan District Attorney's office launched its payola probe in 1959, Mr. Wexler made the stomach-churning trip downtown alone. (Mr. Wexler acknowledges that Atlantic -- like most record labels at that time -- was involved in payola; no one in the company was charged.) And while the diplomat's son enjoyed the cool breeze that summer at the Newport Jazz Festival, Mr. Wexler worked the phones, promoting Atlantic's artists to disk jockeys and distributors. It was an unlikely career for the son of Polish and German Jewish emigres whose ethnic self-consciousness forever shaped his worldview. His father was a window washer, steeped in Talmudic lore, consumed by frustration and fear. But his mother was an intellectual free spirit whose all-consuming love for her son bordered on the obsessive.

Mr. Wexler's reflections read like a confessional that begs no absolution. He admits that he was unfaithful to a wife whom he adored, and that he was emotionally alienated from his children. However, he dedicates "Rhythm and the Blues" to Ahmet Ertegun. In the chapter "Rashomon at the Oak Room," Mr. Wexler recalls a pivotal 1964 meeting at which he proposed that Atlantic merge with another label. Mr. Ertegun saw this as a maneuver to buy him out, and their relationship was never the same.

Nor were their endeavors. Mr. Ertegun developed pop acts like the Young Rascals in New York and Sonny and Cher in Los Angeles during the mid-1960's; Mr. Wexler focused on the Deep South, where gospel-trained singers and young white musicians steeped in country and rhythm-and-blues were creating a new kind of personal expression in Memphis and nearby Muscle Shoals, Ala. Bare-boned and uncompromising, this was the flowering of soul music.

MR. WEXLER'S legendary sessions with Aretha Franklin would catapult him into America's pop pantheon. After seven years at Columbia Records, Miss Franklin's quest for pop stardom was clouded by deep disappointment. She was a gospel prodigy -- arguably the finest voice in popular music -- but her promise was lost in a sea of strings and muted by the wrong material. Mr. Wexler took her to Muscle Shoals, where, he recalls, "I urged Aretha to be Aretha." Seated at the piano, surrounded by the band, her voice filled with mysterious sorrow, Miss Franklin effectively reshaped popular music. Mr. Wexler's production of "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)," "Do Right Woman -- Do Right Man" and "Respect" shook the foundation of a complacent pop establishment and put Miss Franklin's star in orbit. By redeeming her career, Mr. Wexler made his own. "I sailed under the flag of impassioned fandom," he writes.

His love affair with black music began in the clubs of Harlem. Eventually he learned that there was a cutthroat side to the business. And when the record industry mirrored the surging black militancy that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Mr. Wexler, who had moved easily among blacks, was suddenly suspect. At a music industry convention in Miami, he writes, rumors made the rounds that he was ripping off Miss Franklin's royalties. His friend, the saxophonist King Curtis, warned him, "Someone's after you with a gun," and later escorted Mr. Wexler from the banquet hall in the company of a pistol-packing singer, Titus Turner. "Neither Aretha nor her manager and brother, Cecil, had any complaints -- ever," Mr. Wexler writes. "Aretha and I went on working together for seven more years." Yet Mr. Wexler was accustomed to dealing with music business heavies and their sub-rosa rituals. Once he begged the seminal disk jockey Alan Freed to forgo his customary bribe, but the father of payola politely demurred. "I'd love to, Wex, but I can't do it," he said. "That's taking the bread out of my children's mouths."

Mr. Wexler spins a great yarn, and "Rhythm and the Blues" is loaded with juicy tales about music immortals like Phil Spector, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and Solomon Burke. Some of the recollections are painful, such as the story of his daughter's death from AIDS. Some are ironic. Scarred by memories of deprivation, Mr. Wexler persuaded his partners to sell Atlantic to Warner Brothers-Seven Arts for a mere $17.5 million in 1967. ("I had mistakenly figured we were at our zenith," he writes ruefully.)

In the end, "Rhythm and the Blues" never solves the riddle of Mr. Wexler's personality. At the age of 76, he is still given to introspection. He quotes Lenny Bruce as saying, "Suffering teaches us only that suffering has absolutely no value." Perhaps the autobiographical process was cathartic. Consider that "Rhythm and the Blues" is spiced with unflattering broadsides from Mr. Wexler's relatives and associates, which he absorbs without retaliating. Obviously, Mr. Wexler wants his readers to love him. He doesn't seem to realize that music lovers already do.

http://query.nytimes.com/...A965958260


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...w/Aretha Franklin





tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

RIP !
A legend and one of the last true "Record Men"

oh, man.

I was only just playing 'Dusty In Memphis' yesterday.



Very sad.

THIS should be a sticky. His mark on music is indelible.

namepeace said:

I concur.

Timmy84 said:

without a doubt

WX147 said:

Got this in the 80 gig Zune

Sad, sad, sad. Where are the Wexlers today?

Wow, another giant. . . gone.