Born in Istanbul in the Ottoman Empire, Nesuhi and his family, including his younger brother Ahmet, moved to Washington, D.C., in 1935 with their father Munir Ertegun, who was appointed the Turkish Ambassador to the United States that year.

[a] Although his main interest was initially New Orleans jazz, which he also wrote about while serving as the editor of Record Changer magazine, Ertegun was open to more modern styles.

As a producer at Atlantic he worked with John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, whom Lester Koenig had previously recorded at Contemporary, the Modern Jazz Quartet and many others.

They were instrumental in bringing in soccer legends like Giorgio Chinaglia, Pelé, Carlos Alberto and Franz Beckenbauer to the club.

Ertegun died on July 15, 1989, at the age of 71, from complications of cancer surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital (Manhattan) in New York City.

His collection (along with that of his friend Daniel Filipacchi) was exhibited at the Guggenheim in New York in 1999 in "Surrealism: Two Private Eyes, the Nesuhi Ertegun and Daniel Filipacchi Collections"—an event described by The New York Times as "a gourmet banquet", large enough to "pack the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum from ceiling to lobby with a powerful exhibition".