Some 20 years ago I watched as Eddie Palmieri approached his piano, noting how his features radiated a mix of joy and excitement. As soon as he began to play I grasped why. To say the great Puerto Rican New Yorker was a thrilling performer is an understatement: seated at the piano he threw himself into playing explosive Latin jazz, his rhythmic attack reminding me how his first job as a professional musician was playing timbales in his uncle’s band aged 13. This sense of joy, the excitement he found in making music, the chances he took, helped shape Eddie Palmieri’s long, brilliant career.
To my mind, Palmieri was one of the truly revolutionary figures of postwar American music, up there with Muddy and Miles and Aretha and Dolly: a musician who reshaped a genre and extended the music’s possibilities. “El Maestro” is how his fans and fellow musicians referred to Eddie, and this human hurricane, built like a fire hydrant with the brightest smile and a mischievous twinkle in his eye, never disappointed.
Born to Puerto Rican parents in Spanish Harlem and raised in the Bronx, Palmieri grew up absorbing the music of his fellow Latinos – from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Venezuela and, especially, Cuba – alongside the contemporary jazz and blues of his African American neighbours. Eddie started piano lessons aged eight – his brother Charlie Palmieri, nine years his senior, having already made his name playing Latin ballrooms while still in high school – and, by his early teens, was working alongside the likes of Tito Rodriguez while leading his own band. His love of Thelonious Monk and McCoy Tyner’s groundbreaking jazz piano ensured he studied harmony and determined to extend the possibilities of the Latin big band.
Due to his enthusiasm for modern jazz, Eddie’s playing was often unconventional, employing unorthodox patterns and percussive effects, all the while drawing on the rhythmic richness of Latin music. His adventurous spirit ensured he influenced jazz, Latin and funk musicians while his generosity as a bandleader meant young musicians gravitated towards him, and the likes of Celia Cruz, Willie Cólon and Herbie Mann all appreciated his skills as a sideman.
Palmieri made so much remarkable music across his long creative life its hard to know where to start when suggesting what to listen to. With his band La Perfecta he recorded 1965 solo album Azúcar pa’ Ti (Sugar for You), a pioneering Latin American recording that laid a blueprint for what would soon be recognised as the New York salsa sound. The eight-minute long Azúcar got heavy radio play on jazz radio stations that previously had kept to the three-minute format. Eddie, when asked how he achieved this, simply noted that the mob-affiliated Morris Levy owned the label: when Morris instructed DJs what to play they obeyed. The album also marks the first recording of Palmieri playing his trademark montuno (a repeated syncopated vamp) with one hand while soloing with the other.
In 1970 Eddie formed Harlem River Drive with brother Charlie. Recruiting top Latino musicians, and Black funk/soul musicians such as Bernard Purdie and Cornell Dupree, HRD’s eponymous 1971 album served up a hugely influential Latin/funk fusion – War, the great Los Angeles funk band, borrowed heavily from Harlem River Drive while acid jazz DJs would introduce the album to UK clubs in the 90s.
In 1974, album The Sun of Latin Music again demonstrated Eddie’s mastery of blending jazz improvisation with sophisticated Latin dance rhythms – it won Palmieri the first ever Grammy for best Latin recording. Here he employed modal stylings, feedback and tape loops, marking himself as way ahead of his contemporaries yet never losing his core Latino audience.
Eddie had helped pioneer and popularise salsa but, once it became a popular dance genre, he moved on, always experimenting, never resting on laurels. He loved to collaborate and his albums with the likes of Cal Tjader, La India, Tito Puente and his brother Charlie are all masterful. His adventurous nature meant he was invited to play on 1997’s Nuyorican Soul album by Masters at Work – this album took New York’s Latin flavours into the house music genre and won Palmieri a new audience. Not that Eddie was about to settle into Latin house – he kept pushing his own musical envelope and 2017 album Sabiduría (“Wisdom”) is among his finest.
I had hoped to see Palmieri play again one day, but least I have the memory of seeing El Maestro pound his piano with wild joy, this Nuyorican magus furiously blending jazz and Latin rhythms as he continued to quest across uncharted musical terrain.
