One of the Latin jazz pioneers is turned off. Eddie Palmieri, brain and heart of dozens of salsa groups, died this Wednesday at age 88 in his New Jersey residence after a long disease, as his daughter Gabriela has confirmed. The New York pianist of Puerto Rican roots, nicknamed the “Crazy of Salsa”, was one of the first to venture into the fusion between jazz, mambo and the Chachachá, defining a new genre that captivated during the seventies the criticism and fans and artists such as Johnny Pacheco, Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, Cheo Feliciano, Cheo Feliciano, Cheo Felician, Cheo Felician and Ray. Palmieri obtained in 1976 the first Grammy to Latin music, a genre that today has managed to tear down linguistic barriers to become a global phenomenon.
Palmieri was one of the pillars that catapulted the genre to a new level. He did it with more than 2,500 concerts since 1974, the first year he played in Europe. Then he made the leap to Oceania and Asia, where he saw first hand how Afro -Caribbean rhythms connected with the public on the five continents.
The artist used to qualify the Latin jazz a “fusion of the 21st century.” A hurricane force behind the keyboard, the musician used to theorize with the formula of his unique sound. This, he explained, was based on the rhythmic section for a compass of 8/8 lent by African music, which was modified by his pulse while combining with Cuban rhythms. “What intrigues me is to make jazz harmonies layers with those patterns,” he said in an interview years ago.
Palmieri was considered, deep down, a percussionist. This passion can be well seen in the arrangements it made to The piano rumber (1998) o Mambo with Conga is Mozambique (1964), an album that sounded little in the United States because the radios considered that their rhythms flirted dangerously with communism.
Born in East Harlem (New York) in December 1936 in an emigrated family from Ponce, Puerto Rico, an electrician father and seamstress, Palmieri began his music education almost as soon as the formal. His mother, a great music fan, sought that his youngest son received piano lessons from the age of eight, following Charlie’s example, the firstborn of the family. Classes at Carnegie Hall came until she was a teenager.
Five years later, the Palmieri brothers were already developing with ease between the Harlem and Bronx orchestras. His first group was Chinese and his tropical souls, led by the boys’ uncle, and where Eddie pounded the timbales, a key instrument for the artist to understand the rhythmic tension between the parts of a musical set. “Whenever I play a single piano, I give the base to one of the percussionists so we can synchronize,” Palmieri explained in an interview.
With 15 years of age, the piano percussions changed and joined the Puerto Rican vocalist Joe Quijano to found his first group. It was then the fifties and in the New York bars the exploration sounds of jazzistas such as Miles Davis, Thelonium Monk and McCoy Tyner could be heard, whom Palmieri cited as inspiration.
However, his greatest reference was Tito Puente. The Latin music titan incorporated in the piano in 1954 Charlie Palmieri, nine years older than Eddie, and who had studied music in Juilliard. Eddie orbited near his idol in that decade, but had the opportunity to record Masterpiece Together with Puente months before he died in an open heart operation in June 2000. The death frustrated their tour.
With 25 years, Eddie founded the perfect, a group that knew the rapid success and to which seven years were enough to change the course of the new genre. In The new sound (1966) Palmieri exhibited some of his sound innovation with the Vibrafonista Cal Tjader, who was already a well -known exponent of jazz on the west coast. The album was well received by critics, so the pair signed another selection of themes, gathered in Bamboléate.
The press highlighted, especially, the boldness of the perfect, which incorporated trombones into the wind section, which achieved new textures that differentiated them from more traditional sets that continued to bet on the trumpet as the main instrument. The success of the group, formed by Manny Oquendo in the timbales; Tommy Lopez in Las Congas, Barry Rogers in El Trombón, Ismael Quintana in Las Vocals and George Castro on the flute, consolidated them in the New York night scene. For a five years they were a fixed act four times a week in the famous Palladium.
However, they did not fit to be a nightclub musicians. They also conquered radial waves with Sugara tasty nine -minute discharge that came to reproduce entirely in the city’s jazz stations. In it you can hear how Palmieri plays a son Montuno with one hand while improvising with the other. The theme of 1965 was incorporated into the Library of Congress in 2009 for being one of the most important recordings in the country.
The emblematic Diskerage Fania has fired Palmieri on Wednesday, whom she has considered one of the “most innovative and unique” artists in history. It was not a tribute, but the farewell of a musician who was part of the legend of the seal that drove the sauce internationally. The pianist recorded Champagne (1968) Together with Cheo Feliciano, an album that serves as a witness to the Mambo jump to the sauce in New York. In the group used for that album, it stands out in the Bajo Israel Cachao López, another great figure of Latin music, who was newly arrived in the city.
Champagne It was the beginning of a very celebrated creative era for Fania. The album was followed Justice (1969), Superimposition (1970) and the one that is considered one of his masterpieces, Let’s go for Monte (1971), where Palmieri and his musicians reach one of the highest points of innovation and sound ambition. The theme that gives name to the album is considered a classic of the genre, and its lyrics, written by Ismael Quintana, is loaded with political messages and against injustice, another characteristic of Latin music. “Of all the songs I recorded with him (Palmieri), this was the most influential. He played and was requested at virtually any point in Latin America to which we were,” Quintana recalled, who died in 2016.
Palmieri’s passage through Fania was brief. The musician had a difficult reputation and of being “crazy” to seek to impose his artistic vision on all things, a point that could be strenuous for the producers and the owners of the stamps. He starred in an incarnate conflict with Morris Levy, a controversial executive of the ethical label investigated by the FBI for his links with the mafia. The tense relationship made Levy deliver the businesses he had with the Puerto Rican musician to a minor seal, Coco. The company also had many disagreements with Palmieri, who refused to record new music for them for three years.
From the brief relationship with Coco, however, it came out Unfinished Masterpiece. The album, very celebrated and has been reissued in vinyl after half a century, made it worthy of one of the ten Grammy awards that he won in life (he was nominated 14 times). The most important of these awards was perhaps the first, in 1976, by The Sun of Latin Musicwhich was taken by the newly created category, Latin recording.
His role within the recording academy was relevant. It was for several years one of the governors of the institution in New York, from where he pushed to give greater recognition to Latin exponents. In 1995 he made the Grammy reward the best Latin Jazz album. The category was eliminated in 2011, which caused an airy Palmieri reaction, who described the maneuver in a letter as an “act of marginalization.” The Academy corrected the course the following year.