EDDIE PALMIERI

Born: Bronx, New York, 15 December 1936

Genre: Latin, Jazz, World

Best-selling album since 1990: Obra Maestra (2000)

Hit songs since 1990: "Muneca"

Eddie Palmieri was dubbed "the sun of Latin music" in the early 1970s for his searingly brilliant style, which fused advanced jazz ideas with New York–inflected Afro-Cuban rhythms. His musical star has shone brightly since childhood; he made a Carnegie Recital Hall debut on a classical piano piece at the age of eleven. Since the death of his colleague Tito Puente in 2000, Palmieri has reigned as the leading exponent of Latin jazz for serious listening and social dancing.

Cuban dance bands embraced modern jazz elements as early as the 1940s, when the Havana-born Mario Bauza mentored Dizzy Gillespie. Latin-influenced jazz was a staple of post–World War II ballrooms, succeeding the popular swing bands in several major cities of the United States. Palmieri's uncle Chino had a dance band in which Eddie had his first job as a teenage timbales player; his brother Charlie, older by nine years, was already a recognized Latin keyboardist and arranger by the mid-1950s, when Eddie entered the scene around New York's Palladium Theater in Spanish Harlem. His apprenticeship culminated in membership in the Tito Rodriguez Orchestra from 1958 to 1960.

In 1961 Eddie Palmieri introduced Conjunto La Perfecta, pitting two burly trombones against the precision of the traditional flute-led charanga band. He retained the dynamic lineup of piano, bass, timbales, clavé sticks, and congas with which Cuban music spins its compelling polyrhythms. The ensemble, built around the horn charts of the trombonist Barry Rogers, was scoffed at as elephantine (Charlie called it "the trombonga"), but La Perfecta re-charged urban Latin music for the 1960s.

Though Palmieri is deeply grounded by Afro-Cuban dance band traditions and Yoruba-derived rhythms, he admires Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, McCoy Tyner, and jazz modernism in general; he chooses for his band musicians whose improvisational skills can stretch his challenging arrangements. Of the five La Perfecta albums, two are collaborations with innovative vibraphonist Cal Tjader; they are landmarks of Latin jazz that introduce production techniques their producer, Creed Taylor, marketed in the mid-1970s as "smooth jazz." Palmieri influenced jazz musicians such as Herbie Mann and colleagues such as Mongo Santamaria's arranger, Marty Sheller, and the Fania All-Stars composer/arranger/producer/bandleader Johnny Pacheco.

After La Perfecta dissolved in 1968, Palmieri concocted new combinations, most often playing piano in the center of jazz orchestra-sized ensembles. He has long been a talent scout, discovering vocalists and instrumentalists who have sustained strong careers, such as the singers Ishmael Quintana and Cheo Feliciano, the percussionists Nicky Marrerro and Giovanni Hidalgo, the bassists Andy Gonzalez and John Benitez, and the baritone saxophonist Ronnie Cuber. He can boast such crossover innovations as the edgy convergence of heated Latin music and black rhythm and blues of the band Harlem River Drive as documented on the album Live at Sing-Sing (1972).

He writes cutting melodies for horns and dark, edgy harmonies that suggest tension and stress; he was an early adapter of electric basses, electric pianos, and synthesizers, although after the mid-1980s he returned to less processed and/or amplified instrumentation. A small, wiry, talkative, intense figure, Palmieri excels at improvising dramatic, out-of-time introductions, breaks or codas in contrast to his players' fast, hot solos and the vivid, swirling ensemble passages he pens.

Palmieri won his first Grammy Award in the newly created Latin Record of the Year category in 1976, for the album Sun of Latin Music (1974). He protested the release of his next album, Unfinished Masterpiece (1976), but it, too, won a Grammy. Each of his next five albums, issued between 1978 and 1987, was a Grammy nominee, and in each he refined his recipe, adding or reshaping elements of rhythm and blues, avant garde jazz, a dialect from this or that outpost of the African diaspora, and Afro-Cuban music.

In the early 1980s Palmieri relocated to Puerto Rico, but found his Eddie Palmieri Orchestra excluded from the best bookings, despite Grammy wins in the category Best Tropical Latin Performance for Palo Pa' Rumba (1983) in 1984, Solito (1984) in 1985, and La Verdad (1987) in 1988. Returning to New York, he contracted with Nonesuch Records in 1990, hoping to reach beyond his urban Latin fan base to a sophisticated, adventurous record market. Though he retains his core listenership and enjoys nearly unanimous raves from the music press, Palmieri's Latin jazz has not achieved mainstream American acceptance comparable to reggae or Brazilian pop. His genre is ghettoized, as in the way it has been used to represent New York Latinos on film soundtracks for Brian DePalma's Carlito's Way (1993) and Spike Lee's Crooklyn (1994).

In the 1990s Palmieri promulgated his theory that Latin rhythms can be applied "scientifically" to many strains of composition from Western Classical tradition to good effect; to prove it he embarked on adaptations of Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven pieces for Latin jazz band, in clavé (a fundamental beat of two and three strokes, in rapid succession). For a JVC Jazz Festival performance at Carnegie Hall in the late 1990s, he rewrote a concert by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for the combined forces of his band and Puente's. Their collaborative album, Obra Maestra (2000), an extravaganza featuring a twenty-six-piece all-star ensemble, was a Grammy winner for "Best Salsa Performance." It was also Tito Puente's last recording.

As younger Latin artists and audiences gravitate toward pop and disco dance styles and incorporate West Coast-Mexican influences, Palmieri asserts his jazz links with ensembles of excellent horn players such as the alto saxophonist Donald Harrison, the trumpeter Brian Lynch, and the trombonist Conrad Herwig, a lineup represented on several of his recordings of the 1990s. On La Perfecta II (2002), Palmieri revisited some of his 1960s breakthrough material, giving it subtle new gloss. His albums convey much of his energy, but his music is best experienced live.

Despite his originality, continued Grammy Awards recognition, the devotion of hard-core fans, the interest of more mainstream markets, his rigorous performance schedule, and his unrivaled claim of Latin jazz kingpin, Eddie Palmieri has not achieved household-name recognition or overwhelming records sales. But his restless creativity is well recognized for advancing the art and pleasures of Latin music

Spot Light: Palmieri Establishes Latin Jazz Grammy

In 1976, the year the Grammys first conferred an award for Best Latin Album, the honor went to Eddie Palmieri for The Sun of Latin Music. He won again the next year, for Unfinished Masterpiece. He also won Grammys in the strangely titled category "Best Tropical Performance" for Palo Pa' Rumba (1984), Solito (1985), and La Verdad (1988), and he has been nominated innumerable times, in both Latin, salsa, and jazz categories. But as a board member since 1993 of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, New York chapter, Palmieri argued that Latin jazz, the genuine hybrid, was no longer his alone, but rather a genre with much creativity and innovation deserving its own recognition. He was obviously persuasive; the first Grammy for "Best Latin Jazz Performance" for albums by solo artists, duos, or groups, vocal or instrumental (compilations not eligible) was presented in 1995 to Cuban-born, Miami-based trumpeter Arturo Sandoval's Danzon. Palmieri was a contender that year for his Palmas and again in 1996 for Arete, which was beaten out by Antonio Brazileiro (1995), the last album by Brazilian bossa nova star Antonio Carlos Jobim.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Live at Sing-Sing (Tico, 1972); Unfinished Masterpiece (Musical Production, 1979); Sueno (Intuition, 1982); ); La Verdad: The Truth (Fania, 1987); Salsa-Jazz-Descargas-Exploration (Musical Productions, 1991); EP (Fania, 1993); Palmas (Elektra, 1993); Palmieri and Tjader (Tico, 1993); The Sun of Latin Music (Musical Production, 1995); Arete (RMM, 1995); Live (RMM, 1999); La Perfecta II (Nonesuch, 2002); El Rumbero del Piano (RMM, 1998); With Tito Puente: Obra Maestra (2000). With Cal Tjader: El Sonido Nuevo: The New Soul Sound (Verve, 1967).

howard mandel