Eddie Palmieri
Salsa's Innovative Traditionalist
By Neil Leonard

Published in Rhythm Music Magazine
Vol. 2, Num. 9, Sept., 1993
copyright 1993, Neil Leonard

For the past thirty years Salsa pianist-composer-arranger Eddie Palmieri has been a leading figure in Latin dance music.  Like Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton, who filled the dance floors of the Apollo and Savoy Ballrooms in Harlem with "Lindy Hopping" enthusiasts, Palmieri sucessfully blended the most irressitable rhythms with innovative ensemble work and jazz improvisation.

Palmieri has been nominated for eight Grammy awards and won five.  In 1988 the Smithsonian Institution recorded two of his pieces for the catalog of the National Museum of American History.  When Paul Simon recorded the "Rhythm of the Saints" he first turned to Palmieri who introducing him to the Afro-Cuban music and musicians in New York.  His thirty albums have had tremendous appeal in both the salsa and jazz communities.

Palmieri, 57, was born in Spanish Harlem to Puerto Rican parents.  Taking up piano at age eight, he began playing classical recitals at eleven.  His parents hoped that learning piano would keep him off the street, but he became fascinated with the hip mannerisms and sharp wardrobes of local dance musicians and took up the timbales.  He joined his uncle's conjunto at age thirteen and played with them for two years.

He eventually gravitated back to piano.  His brother Charlie, nine years his senior, had become a very successful pianist and began recommending Eddie as a sideman for some of the finest Latin bands in New York.  But, Eddie's heavy handed style led to his dismissal from a number of groups and earned him the name Rompetecla (key breaker).  Then at age twenty Palmieri overhauled his approach after hearing a recording of "Me Voy Contigo" by Cuban trumpeter Felix Chapotin.  He was converted to Cuban music and studied it passionately, almost to the exclusion of all other influences. 

Cuban music, with its genuine African rhythms and elegant dance forms - the danzon, charanga, son montuno, cha cha cha and mambo - had dominated the Latin music scene in New York since the 1940's, drawing heavily from the steady stream of musical innovation flowing north from Havana.  When Cuba adopted socialism in 1961, the U.S. broke diplomatic relations with the island, prohibiting trade, and forcing the Latin music community in the U.S. to survive on its own.  Latin musicians who had assimilated the Cuban sound, such as the Palmieri Brothers, Willie Colon and Ray Barretto, came forth to fill the space that the Cubans had left behind.

Palmieri rose to national prominence with his first group, Conjunto La Perfecta, which became a seminal band of the early sixties.  Palmieri's admiration for Stan Kenton's powerful brass orchestrations caused him to depart from the typical Cuban instrumentation, which emphasized trumpets in the small ensemble, in favor of his own horn sound based on two trombones and flute.  During the mid-seventies when the jazz avant-garde was reaching a critical peak of harmonic freedom and modal experimentation, Palmieri masterfully assimilated the new developments without sacrificing rhythmic drive and complexity, earning him a reputation as the most progressive band director and arranger in salsa.

After a decade of playing the Latin circuit, Palmieri reached an uncomfortable point where he felt loyal to his Hispanic audience but artistically and financially restricted.  Even the best performers worked long hours for low pay and found limited acceptance for innovation.  To make matters worse, Palmieri's eccentic business dealings, sometimes cantankerous on-stage behavior and selective attendance at his own concerts earned him a reputation for being difficult to work with.  Unable to withstand the constant presures of maintaining a headlining band, Palmieri broke up La Perfecta and went into seclusion for a year.  Palmieri's efforts to revive his career in the early seventies were musically successful but plagued by more business problems which eventually led to the disbanding of another excellent group in 1974.

Then, in 1975, national attention was focused on Palmieri for a highly publicized Avery Fisher Hall Concert with Latin jazz stars Airto and Gato Barbieri.  The same year he won the first Grammy Award in the newly established Latin Music category for his uncompromising album "The Sun of Latin Music".  Uneasy with mass acceptance, Palmieri first planned to skip the award ceremony.  He finally accepted the award, which was presented by Chick Corea, in the name of Latin American Music and his mentor Tito Rodriguez who had just passed away.  The award itself was symbolically important, but more substantially important was the endorsement of the jazz avant garde as represented by Corea (who had been working with Miles Davis, Marion Brown and Anthony Braxton).  This combination of the Latin band leader and jazz pioneer echoed the historic meeting between Mario Bauzá, the godfather of Afro-Cuban jazz and Dizzy Gillespie, a meeting that marked a turning point in American Music.

While Palmieri's career was revitalized, he was concerned about the demands of his new audience.  Like Mario Bauzá, who, forty years earlier, saw Desi Arnaz and Xaviar Cugat capitalize on watered down versions of Cuban music in Hollywood, Palmieri watched Carlos Santana market an electrified Cuban music to the Woodstock generation.  Although Palmieri refused to compromise the authenticity of his Cuban sound, he went as far as working with Bay Area promoter Billy Graham, who once booked him as an opener for a concert headlined by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the Jefferson Starship, Graham Central Station, Santana and the Grateful Dead. 

Palmieri's mid-seventies success enabled him to expand his audience beyond the Latin music circuit and tour extensively throughout Africa, Europe, Japan, the Middle East and the Americas.  Throughout the eighties, Palmieri, while no longer the innovator he once had been, was still a first rate performer and his recordings won him three more Grammies.  Today Palmieri tours extensively with an octet composed of a hard-core Latin rhythm section with a seasoned jazz horn section. 

I heard the group during their current tour.  Palmieri blended his insistent piano counterpoint with embellishments in the spirit of jazz pianists McCoy Tyner, Horace Silver and Thelonius Monk. Uniting his left-hand pattern with the tumbao [pattern outlined by the bassist] and aggressively pushing the rhythm section as if he were another drummer, Palmieri spurred on the soloists.

The hight point of the set was a medley of Palmieri's Azucar that segued into the Cuban classic Camaguayanos y Habaneros, a climactic drum feature that took us on a carefully navigated journey to the core of the group's Afro-Cuban roots.  While this medley took on the proportions of an Afro-Cuban jazz suite, other pieces tended to lack a corresponding depth and relied on more predictable mainstream jazz conventions such as the melody-solo-melody format.  The set could only have been improved if Palmieri had integrated more of his innovative arranging style, an integral part of his monumental contribution to American music.

Palmieri's current touring group will be featured on his newest CD, scheduled for release early next year, on the Elektra Asylum label.

Neil Leonard III is a composer, performer and music educator who has been conducting music research in Cuba on a regular basis music since 1986.  He is currently teaching in the Music Synthesis Department at Berklee College of Music.