Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 240 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
Get ready to get up and move to the rhythms evoked by Latin jazz pianist, composer, and bandleader Eddie Palmieri, as we celebrate “El Maestro’s” 88th birthday.
Palmieri—a master of jazz, Latin jazz, and salsa, along with some brilliant excursions into Latin funk—is a living legend, still going strong after more than seven decades of performing.
In a Nov. 17 feature for The New Yorker, Carinadel Valle Schorske wrote about his longevity.
Eddie Palmieri Says Don’t Call It a Comeback
The eighty-seven-year-old pianist, bandleader, and Jazz Master is a living link between mambo and salsa—and he’s never been busier.
On a cool night this past spring, the line outside the Blue Note ran down the block, causing enough of a scene that a young man stopped to ask, “Who’s it for?” A woman in a fur coat near the front shouted back, “Eddie Palmieri!” “Ah, Eddie Palmieri,” the passerby replied, “Con razón!” The eighty-seven-year-old Nuyorican pianist and bandleader has been a fixture of the city’s night life since the nineteen-fifties. Critics have called him “our Beethoven” and “the architect of progressive salsa.” To fellow-musicians, he’s El Rumbero del Piano, Maestro, and the Latin Monk (as in Thelonious). Eddie II, Palmieri’s manager and his only son, puts it more plainly: “My dad is the No. 1 Motherfucker.” These days, Palmieri often describes himself as “the Last of the Mohicans,” having survived many of his hard-living peers.
Also covered were Palmieri’s Puerto Rican roots and Nuyorican beginnings.
Isabel Maldonado left Ponce by steamship in 1925, and Carlos Palmieri followed her the next year, arriving in New York a generation before the city’s mid-century wave of Puerto Rican migration. Their two children were born in Spanish Harlem: Charlie in 1927, and Eddie in 1936. When Eddie was around five years old, the family moved to the South Bronx. The neighborhood was mostly German, Irish, and Jewish, and new housing projects were beginning to attract rural migrants from the Caribbean and the American South. Isabel thought piano lessons might help keep the boys off the streets. They went to study with Margaret Bonds, a Black American classical concert musician with a studio on the top floor of Carnegie Hall. But their training wasn’t only academic: Isabel’s brother had a band called El Chino y Su Alma Tropical, and sometimes the family would go down to Harlem to record 78s. In 1949, the Palmieris opened a luncheonette called El Mambo, after the Afro-Cuban music that was sweeping dance halls from Caracas to the Catskills. Palmieri told me that he remembers playing stickball out front with the radio blasting “Machito and his Afro-Cubans,Tito Puente, all day long, all night long—you had no choice!”
In an October interview with Claudia Morales at the Library of Congress Music Division, Palmieri spoke about those musical beginnings.
I want to share my own initial introduction to Palmieri, as a salsera—someone who dances salsa, as I discussed here. In my late teenage years, my Black and Puerto Rican friends and I went out dancing several nights a week, hitting all of the clubs that featured Latin bands. Those of us who lived in Queens were members of Black American social clubs.
One prominent Queens club, The Kingsmen, had arranged to have a Latin music night at The St. Alban’s Plaza, a venue in our neighborhood. They’d planned to book Charlie Palmieri (Eddie’s older brother), but he was unavailable. However, the booking agency countered, his younger brother had a band that was.
The guys in the Kingsmen were dubious—they had never heard of Eddie. But since they’d already announced they were holding the event, they said a silent prayer, and booked Eddie, who rocked the house!
Years later I interviewed Palmieri, and he remembered that a group of Black Americans had been one of the first groups to give him a shot at a major dance gig!
When I think back to those dancing days. one song stands out—unlike most tunes, then or now, it was over nine minutes of exhilaration.
From the Library of Congress:
"Azucar Pa' Ti" (album). Eddie Palmieri. (1965)
This album pointed the way for Latin music in the United States in the 1960s and beyond, and was the result of a conscious effort on Palmieri's part to capture on record the sound he and his eight piece La Perfecta band were then serving up to New York nightclub audiences. Though steeped in the earlier Afro-Cuban styles that he loved, Palmieri's band represented several Latin music traditions, and was particularly distinguished by the contributions of the hard-charging, Bronx-born trombonist Barry Rogers.
Here’s "Azucar Pa' Ti" (“Sugar for You” in English):
It’s important to put the music and dancing into the context of the times, and to understand how contemporary social conditions and politics would ultimately affect and shape Palmieri’s music.
This salsa club mapping project, put together by journalist, filmmaker, and photographer Marcos Echeverría Ortiz will set the scene.
Meanwhile, Palmieri was open to new musical explorations. In 1966, he teamed up with jazz vibraphonist Cal Tjader to produce the album “El Sonido Nuevo.” Here’s the title track:
Renowned African American studies scholar and historian Robert Farris Thompson weighed in with his reaction to the album for a review by Tomás Peña for Latin Jazz Net.
“The finest work to date is, without question, El Sonido Nuevo. Vocal music is jettisoned, thus revealing, once and for all, the depth of Palmieri’s instrumental resources. Every single track of this LP is epochal. The clatter set up by (Barry) Rogers in “Los Jíbaros,” for example, is extremely artistic and “Ritmo Uni” is the most finished document of the trombone dimension in Sonido Nuevo that has yet been heard. Palmieri fulfills the promise of his “Azucar” (Sugar For You) experiment in a variety of tracks, inventing new ostinatos and melodic fragments and counter ostinatos and single-note accents, becoming a virtual pianistic kaleidoscope.” –
In 1969, Palmieri would release the album “Justicia” (“Justice”). As Fania Records notes:
Woodstock became the counter culture concert with half a million hippies and flower children taking center stage on the news. Richard Nixon was elected President while Easy Rider premiered in the movies. The NY Mets won the World Series while the black Brazilian, “Pelé” made worldwide headlines. 747 jets made their debut in the skies. The Beatles released their last recording together while John & Yoko conducted a “bed-in” for the media. Jennifer Lopez was born 1969, the same year that NASA put the first man on the moon.
Back on earth, a young Eddie Palmieri was tormented. Featured on the left hand cover of this groundbreaking recording wearing a knit sweater, cross-legged with his head in his hands, Eddie gives us music that comes from this time of transition. A thinking man’s musician, Eddie was one of the first to enter the penitentiaries bringing free music to the forgotten. He marched with Cesar Chavez and played benefits for his and many other organizations. He was among the first to record live from the student campus of Puerto Rico and played many fund-raisers for activists that had impact on an awakening Latino community.
And as music blogger Emily Springer commented:
“Justicia” offers us more than the inherent mixing of traditional Caribbean sounds we expect from salsa, but also the influence of jazz and soul from the late 60s. On the precipice of the 70s, Palmieri gifted his listeners a musical journey that speaks to the complicated realities of life as a Boricua in New York. The title track of this album, traditional in Afro-Caribbean sound, is far from traditional in its lyrics. “Justicia” asks “¿Cuándo llegará?, ¿cuándo llegará? Justicia pa' los boricuas y los niches” or “When will it come? When will it come? Justice for the boricuas and the Black Americans.” Artists across genres were all seeking answers to questions about race, Vietnam, and the social condition of minorities in the US. Palmieri like several other artists from Fania and Tico, took his moment to ask the question and reckon with the reality Puerto Ricans in NYC were living through. What makes his message even more impactful for me, is the willingness to see the struggle of Black Americans and Puerto Ricans as inherently linked.
Have a listen.
I would be remiss if I did not mention. the 1973 release of “Sentido,” which included the song “Puerto Rico”—which has become both an anthem and a love letter to the island and its people. Find the lyrics and translation here.
As previously noted, Palmieri, ever the innovator, has never been afraid to explore new musical territory. In “An Introduction to Eddie Palmieri: A Revolution on Harlem River Drive” music Professor Chris Washburne explores Palmieri’s venture into a new sound.
The pinnacle of Palmieri’s career as a socially conscious artist was the revolutionary group he co-led with his brother Charlie, called Harlem River Drive. The band was named after a highway that cuts through Harlem, allowing cars to bypass the local streets of the neighborhood entirely, where the rich zipped past to avoid the harsh social realities of the ghetto. For Palmieri, this highway was a symbol of the inequalities of modern society. It was no accident that his group combined Latin, soul and free jazz in a way that sought to unify all of Harlem in the face of adversity. Palmieri’s Harlem River Drive group employed members of Aretha Franklin’s band, alongside some of the most important Latin musicians and jazz soloists of the day, such as Ronnie Cuber, Barry Rogers and Bernard Purdie.
The project sonically unified both black and Spanish Harlem, aligning and empowering two neighboring communities that were suffering similar iniquities. Stylistically, though, it cut a broad swath through Harlem, zigzagging between popular grooves and mashing them together in novel ways – from the guajira funk mix of the title track, to straight ahead soul in “If We Had Peace Today,” to the funk guaracha mix of “Idle Hands,” to a Bitches Brew-inspired free jazz jam in “Broken Home,” and to the funk-mambo mix of “Seeds of Life.” Sonically the project was way ahead of its time, even though it was strongly rooted in the pressing social issues of the day.
In the end, the project was short-lived. Other than a live recording done at Sing Sing Prison, the band did not continue to perform. Regardless, its impact was long lasting, inspiring many bands to explore unique musical mixes that could unify the voices of the people.
Here’s the title track.
Let’s fast-forward to 2016, where we find Palmieri returning to his earlier experiment.
Eddie Palmieri revisits Harlem River Drive in this mini-documentary
The story of a politically-charged Latin masterpiece.
Fresh off the tail of the fiery activism of the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, 1971 was a hotbed of revolutionaries seeking justice, equality, and freedom. It was in this climate that Eddie Palmieri produced one of the most daring albums of the era: Harlem River Drive, a record that brought socially conscious tales of the inner city into the crossover arms of Latin, soul, funk and jazz.
45 years on and RBMA have produced this excellent short film on Eddie Palmieri and this legendary record. “A politically-charged Latin-funk masterpiece so ahead of its time its influence continues to resonate decades later,” they write.
The documentary clocks in at just under 13 minutes.
In 2012, Palmieri scored the music for a documentary on New York City street basketball, “Doin’ It In The Park: Pick-Up Basketball, NYC” For anyone who is a basketball fan, the film is a must-see. My husband was a Puerto Rican street ball player from the Barrio, and he loved it.
Here are some short videos from those sessions.
In August 2016, Palmieri performed an intimate piano solo gig for NPR Music’s “Tiny Desk Concert” series.
As NPR Music notes:
Eddie Palmieri was born in Spanish Harlem and grew up in the Bronx with a large family that nurtured his musical talent. He studied classical piano when he was young and gave a piano recital at Carnegie Hall when he was just 11. But all he wanted to do at that time was play the drums. When he was 13, he joined his uncle's orchestra to play timbales. He later gave up the drums and started playing piano in the early 1950s in various Latin dance bands, working with Eddie Forrester, Johnny Segui and the popular Tito Rodriguez Orchestra. You can hear his continued passion for the sticks in the percussive vamps that pervade his discography.
Recorded in 1962, Perfecta was the first of nearly 50 albums Eddie Palmieri has released. The Sun Of Latin Music, a groundbreaking album released in 1975, won him the first-ever Grammy for Best Latin Recording. He later went on to win nine more Grammys, along with a host of other prestigious honors.
It was an honor to have Eddie Palmieri perform at the Tiny Desk in a special, intimate setting — without his usual big-band accompaniment. We get close enough to hear him growl; you can check out the iconic sound he's been making since his early recordings. He's said it's his inner spirit coming out to help him play. The first composition here, "Iraida," was written for his wife, who died several years ago. The second, "The Persian Scale," is a rare treat — a tune you won't find on any of his recordings. The set closes with "La Libertad," a statement on social justice and poverty from the classic Vamonos Pa'l Monte album, released in the early '70s. Even without the band, the audience clapped and danced as the musician played his freeform dance music, deeply rooted in beautiful yet simple chord changes and his signature Afro-Cuban rhythmic style.The Sun Of Latin Music is available now:iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the...Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Sun-Latin-Musi...Set List:"Iraida""The Persian Scale""La Libertad"
In 2024, Palmieri is still going strong: He’s doing concerts, club performances, and interviews, which are posted to his website.
Here’s an interview and performance from January.
¡Feliz 88 cumpleaños Eddie! Join me in the comments, where we’ll continue the birthday party with lots more!
