Eddie Palmieri, salsa legend and Latin jazz pioneer, dies at 88

One of the pioneers of Latin jazz has passed away. Eddie Palmieri, the brain and heart of dozens of salsa groups, passed away on Wednesday at the age of 88 at his residence in New Jersey after a prolonged illness, his daughter Gabriela has confirmed. The pianist, nicknamed the “Madman of Salsa,” was one of the first to explore the fusion of jazz, mambo and cha-cha-chá, defining a new genre that captivated critics and fans throughout the 1970s alongside other major artists such as Johnny Pacheco, Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, Cheo Feliciano and Ray Barreto. Palmieri won the first Grammy Award for Latin music in 1976, a genre that has now broken down language barriers to become a global phenomenon.

Palmieri was one of the pillars that catapulted the genre to a whole new level. He did so with more than 2,500 concerts starting in 1974, the first year he played in Europe. He then made the leap to Oceania and Asia, where he saw firsthand how Afro-Caribbean rhythms connected with audiences on five continents.

The artist used to call Latin jazz a “21st-century fusion.” A hurricane of force behind the keyboard, the musician would often theorize about the formula for his unique sound. This, he explained, took as its basis for the rhythm section an 8/8 time signature borrowed from African music, modifying its pulse while combining it with Cuban rhythms. “What intrigues me is layering jazz harmonies with those patterns,” he said in an interview years ago.

Palmieri considered himself, at heart, a percussionist. This passion can be clearly seen in his arrangements for El rumbero del piano (1998) and Mambo con Conga es Mozambique (1964), an album that received little airplay in the United States because radio stations considered its rhythms to be flirting dangerously with communism.

Born in East Harlem, New York, in December 1936 to a family that emigrated from Ponce, Puerto Rico, to an electrician father and a seamstress mother, Palmieri began his musical education almost as early as his formal one. His mother, a great music lover, ensured that her youngest son received piano lessons from the age of eight, following the example of Charlie, the family’s eldest son. He didn’t take classes at Carnegie Hall until he was a teenager.

Five years later, the Palmieri brothers were already moving easily among the orchestras of Harlem and the Bronx. Their first band was Chino y sus Almas Tropicales, led by the boys’ uncle, where Eddie played the timbales, a key instrument for the artist to understand the rhythmic tension between the parts of a musical ensemble. “Whenever I play a solo on the piano, I hand the bass line to one of the percussionists so we can synchronize,” Palmieri explained in an interview.

At 15, he switched from percussion to the piano and joined Puerto Rican vocalist Joe Quijano to form his first band. It was the 1950s, and the exploratory sounds of jazz musicians like Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and McCoy Tyner, all of whom Palmieri cited as inspiration, could be heard in New York bars.

However, his greatest role model was Tito Puente. The Latin music titan brought in Charlie Palmieri, nine years Eddie’s senior and a former music major at Juilliard, on piano in 1954. Eddie orbited close to his idol during that decade, and had the opportunity to record Masterpiece with Puente a few months before the latter died during open-heart surgery in June 2000. The death thwarted a tour for both.

At 25, Eddie founded La Perfecta, a group that quickly achieved success and took only seven years to change the course of the new genre. On El Sonido Nuevo (1966), Palmieri showcased some of his sonic innovation alongside vibraphonist Cal Tjader, already a well-known exponent of jazz on the West Coast. The album was well received by critics, so the duo released another selection of songs a year later, compiled on Bamboléate.

The press particularly highlighted La Perfecta’s boldness in incorporating trombones into the wind section, achieving new textures that set them apart from more traditional groups that still relied on the trumpet as their main instrument. The success of the group, consisting of Manny Oquendo on timbales; Tommy Lopez on congas; Barry Rogers on trombone; Ismael Quintana on vocals; and George Castro on flute, cemented their position on the New York nightlife scene. For five years, they were a fixture four times a week at the famous Palladium.

However, they weren’t limited to being nightclub musicians. They also conquered the airwaves with Azúcar, a savory nine-minute descarga that was played in its entirety on the city’s jazz stations. In it, Palmieri can be heard playing a montuno son with one hand while improvising with the other. The 1965 song was inducted into the Library of Congress in 2009 as one of the country’s most important recordings.

The iconic record label Fania said goodbye to Palmieri this Wednesday, calling him one of the “most innovative and unique” artists in music history. This wasn’t a tribute, but rather a farewell to a musician who was part of the label’s legend that propelled salsa to the international stage. The pianist recorded Champagne (1968) with Cheo Feliciano, an album that serves as a testament to the leap from mambo to salsa in New York. The group used for that album featured bassist Israel Cachao López, another great figure in Latin music, who had recently arrived in the city.

Champagne marked the beginning of a highly celebrated creative era for Fania. The album was followed by Justicia (1969), Superimposición (1970), and what is considered one of their masterpieces, Vámonos pa’l Monte (1971), where Palmieri and his musicians reached one of their highest points of innovation and sonic ambition. The title track is considered a classic of the genre, and its lyrics, written by Ismael Quintana, are laden with political messages and against injustices, another hallmark of Latin music. “Of all the songs I recorded with him (Palmieri), this was the most influential. It was played and requested practically everywhere we went in Latin America,” recalled Quintana, who passed away in 2016.

Palmieri’s tenure at Fania was brief. The musician had a reputation for being difficult and “crazy” for trying to impose his artistic vision above all else, a point that could be exhausting for producers and record label owners. He had a bitter conflict with Morris Levy, a controversial executive at the Tico record label investigated by the FBI for his ties to the mafia. The tense relationship led Levy to hand over the business he had with the Puerto Rican musician to a smaller label, Coco. The company also had many disagreements with Palmieri, who refused to record new music for them for three years.

From his brief relationship with Coco, however, came Unfinished Masterpiece. The highly acclaimed album, which has been reissued on vinyl after half a century, earned him one of the 10 Grammy Awards he won during his lifetime (he was nominated 14 times). The most important of these awards was perhaps the first, in 1976, for The Sun of Latin Music, which won in the newly created category, Latin Recording.

His role within the Recording Academy was significant. For several years, he served as one of the institution’s governors in New York, where he pushed for greater recognition of Latin artists. In 1995, he succeeded in getting the Grammys to award the Best Latin Jazz Album. The category was eliminated in 2011, prompting a strong reaction from Palmieri, who described the move in a letter as an “act of marginalization.” The Academy reversed course the following year.

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