Palmieri rides Latin music's wave of popularity
2/08/08
Palmieri rides Latin music's wave of popularity
By Mark Jordan
Special to The Commercial Appeal
Friday, February 8, 2008
Though he doesn't know much about football, Eddie Palmieri watched the festivities celebrating the New York Giants Super Bowl win on television this week from his home in Queens. "I'm an old Giants baseball fan," says Palmieri, explaining his connection to the team.
When the New York native was growing up in the '50s, the city was known as the "Capital of Baseball" due to the rising fortunes of its three Major League teams: the Giants, the Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers. At the same time, New York was the capital of Latin music. Thanks to the pioneering bands of Xavier Cugat and Tito Puente, the music was reaching new heights of popularity 50 years ago, winning over non-Latino audiences and influencing all other genres of music around it.
And at the center of it all was Palmieri.
Palmieri brings a small Latin jazz ensemble -- piano, bass, trumpet, trombone, and a three-piece traditional percussion section of congas, bongos and timbales -- to the Germantown Performing Arts Centre for a Saturday concert.
The son of Puerto Rican immigrants, Palmieri first learned piano from his older brother, Charlie. A noted salsa bandleader and musical director until his death in 1988, Charlie was nine years older than Eddie. When Eddie was just 5, the two would perform in talent shows together. By the time he was 20, Charlie was playing with Tito Puente and soon after was gigging at hotspots like Manhattan's Palladium Ballroom, the epicenter of the post-war mambo craze.
For Eddie, watching his brother take off to gigs with some of the most-talked-about bands of the day, the era was intoxicating.
"There were a lot of great bands, but the Tito Puente Orchestra was insane," recalls Palmieri. "Plus the jazz world was happening because right next to the Palladium you had Birdland. ... So you could go in and dance with the top Latin bands, and then you could go next door and watch the latest jazz, Count Basie or the Duke Ellington band or whoever was in town that week."
Eddie quickly followed his brother into music. At 11 he auditioned at the Carnegie Recital Hall. By 13 he was playing timbales in his uncle's band before switching back to piano to front his own combo at 15.
"It was the carrying of the drums," says Palmieri, a self-admitted frustrated percussionist, of the switch. "My mother would say, 'Don't you see how beautiful your brother looks going to work? And he doesn't have an instrument. When will you learn, Eddie?'"
In 1961, at the age of 25, Eddie made his recording debut with his newly formed group, Conjunto La Perfecta. Now considered one of the seminal Latin dance bands of the era, Perfecta was an instant sensation in its day, thanks to its bold and innovative instrumentation. Playing the fashionable Charanga style of Cuban folk music, Perfecta kept the music's hallmark flute but substituted the traditional strings with a unique dual trombone attack, which made the music more lively and contemporary to New York ears.
"It made a tremendous impression when it first came out," Palmieri recalls. "It was very danceable, very exciting, and very exciting to see the band play."
Perfecta lasted until 1968, and Palmieri, who also counts Art Tatum and McCoy Tyner as influences, began to explore the possibilities of Latin and jazz music. His 1974 recording The Sun of Latin Music,won the first Grammy award ever presented to Latin music.
"It was quite an honor," says Palmieri, whose record had to beat out every other Spanish-language artist, regardless of genre, to win the Best Latin Recording Award. "What happened was they never gave us a category for 17 years. Then they finally put us into a category, finally giving us one Grammy for all Latin artists."
In subsequent years, Palmieri used his clout in the Grammy organization to lobby for more categories for Latin artists and personally helped shepherd the inclusion of the Best Latin Jazz Album category. Today the growing popularity of Latin music has resulted in the Latin Grammys, a stand-alone awards ceremony that is broadcast on national television.
"I was against them breaking off into their own thing, but they had grown so much," says Palmieri.
To this day, Palmieri, 71, continues to take home more than his share of the awards. Last year he garnered his seventh Grammy for Simpatico, a collaboration with jazz trumpet player Brian Lynch.
Concert preview
Eddie Palmieri
8 p.m. Saturday at Germantown Performing Arts Centre.
Tickets are $25-$45 at the GPAC box office, by phone at (901) 751-7500, and online at gpacweb.com.
