The Turkish Embassy Jazz Sessions
History, Still LivingA Segregated Capital
In the 1930s and 1940s Washington DC was segregated by law and by practice. A Black musician could headline a concert in the evening and be refused a meal in most restaurants in the city the same night. Where a person could eat, sleep, sit or enter was determined by race, and that included which door of a building they were expected to use.
One House Where It Stopped
The Turkish ambassador's residence stood at 1606 23rd Street NW, just off Sheridan Circle — a Beaux-Arts mansion built between 1910 and 1915 for the bottling millionaire Edward Hamlin Everett. Münir Ertegün, Türkiye's second ambassador to the United States, moved his family in in 1934. An embassy residence is diplomatic soil. American segregation law did not reach inside it.
The Sunday Sessions
The ambassador's teenage sons, Ahmet and Nesuhi, were obsessive record collectors who went looking for the musicians themselves. From about 1940 they began inviting them to Sunday lunch, and lunch turned into jam sessions that ran all afternoon. Louis Armstrong came. Duke Ellington came. Lester Young, Teddy Wilson, Henry Allen. Black and white musicians played together, in a city where that was not done, week after week, for years. In 1943 the critic William Gottlieb called them in the Washington Post the most famous private jam sessions in Washington. In 1942 the brothers also staged the first integrated public concert in the city.
The Front Door
Southern senators complained to the ambassador — not merely that Black musicians were coming, but that they were coming through the front door rather than the servants' entrance. His answer was one sentence: "We take our guests in from the front door, whoever they are." He did not negotiate it and he did not stop the sessions. They ran until he died in office in 1944.
What the Brothers Did Next
In 1947 Ahmet and Nesuhi founded Atlantic Records. The label signed Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and John Coltrane, and later the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. In October 1967 they sold it to Warner–Seven Arts for $17.5 million, split with their partner Jerry Wexler. Nesuhi founded WEA International in 1971 and ran it until 1987, dying in 1989. Ahmet stayed at the label for four more decades and founded the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, dying in 2006.
Still There
Atlantic Records still operates, now within Warner Music Group. And 1606 23rd Street NW is still the residence of the Turkish ambassador, and still hosts jazz. The photographs of those sessions survive because William Gottlieb — the same critic who wrote about them — was there with a camera, and his negatives are now in the Library of Congress and in the public domain.
Key Dates to Remember
- 1934 — Münir Ertegün posted to Washington
- c. 1940 — The Sunday sessions begin
- 1942 — DC's first integrated public concert
- 1943 — Gottlieb writes them up in the Post
- 1944 — The ambassador dies in office
- 1947 — Atlantic Records founded
- 1967 — Atlantic sold for $17.5 million