Eddie Palmieri's 13 Essential Songs and Albums

New York Times

3 days ago

A Nuyorican original, the pianist and bandleader Eddie Palmieri began his career playing in mambo orchestras at the tail end of the Palladium era — named for the Manhattan club on West 52nd Street where crowds flocked to dance to mambo orchestras with robust horn and percussion sections — using his eclectic training on piano to drive dancers to ecstatic heights. Cutting his teeth with bandleaders like Johnny Segui and the mambo king Tito Rodríguez, Palmieri formed his own band, La Perfecta, in the early 1960s. The style he pioneered in those days would be central to the evolution of a music that what would eventually be called salsa.
Ironically, Palmieri, who died on Wednesday at 88, like other bandleaders of his era, disliked the term, castigating it as a catchall that obscured foundational Afro-Cuban dance rhythms like son, guaracha, guaguancó, danzón and cha cha cha. Yet La Perfecta had a new twist that helped distinguish the New York style from Cuban music: a two-trombone gut punch provided by the Bronx-born Barry Rogers and the Brazilian-born José Rodrigues. The trombones gave Palmieri's band a salty tone that reflected the grind and glamour of the city's streets and barrios, and he increasingly employed lyrics about social justice, giving salsa its distinctive flavor.
Palmieri embraced the counterculture era's strident politics with songs like 'Justicia,' played a famous gig at Sing Sing prison upstate and, departing from salsa protocol, recorded an album called 'Harlem River Drive' with the jazz drummer Bernard Purdie that evoked classics like War's 'The World Is a Ghetto.' He was a pianist driven by Afro-Caribbean percussion while also an acolyte of the music theorist Joseph Schillinger's mathematical approach to composition. After salsa's peak and decline, he made several Latin jazz-themed records and recorded with younger singers like La India and Calle 13's Ilé. He remained committed to New York's Black and Latino community, never losing his love for his beginnings.
Here are 13 essential examples of Palmieri's 60-plus years of recorded work.
'Azúcar'
From a 1965 recording with his original group, La Perfecta, 'Azúcar' is a hard-driving, jazz-inflected anthem for the nascent sound of salsa. Featuring the brash virtuosity of the Rogers-Rodrigues trombone combo, Ismael Quintana's distinctive vocals, Manny Oquendo's precision percussion and Palmieri's double-time piano pounding, it goes from call-and-response to blissful jam session. Although Celia Cruz sealed the deal years later, Palmieri establishes azúcar (Spanish for sugar, the Caribbean's main export) as Afro-Caribbean music's code word for sonic pleasure.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
'Que Suene la Orquesta'
From the 1965 'Mozambique' album, which trades on late-period mambo with hints of pseudo-bugaloo, this track serves as Palmieri's most potent early calling card. Using the piano as a translator of Afro-Cuban percussion lines, Palmieri furiously sets the pace for a series of conga and timbale solos, while the dual trombones honk like a stream of taxis filled with passengers late for the dance.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
'El Sonido Nuevo' and 'Bamboléate' with Cal Tjader
These mid-60s recordings with the West Coast vibist Cal Tjader are sublime evocations of a largely forgotten moment in Latin music history. The chill of Tjader's Latin-style vibraphone evokes a kind of fever-dream transcendence.
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