Eddie Palmieri Says Don’t Call It a Comeback

Latin music is full of directives: “oye cómo va,” “óyelo que te conviene,” “oye bien cómo es.” Listen up and listen well. Many of my first history lessons came via salsa’s dance-floor hits about Indigenous resistance, the plantation system, and the AIDS crisis. But I wanted to learn from one of the music’s original makers, so I spent several months listening to Palmieri, in concert at the Blue Note, in conversation in his kitchen, and in retrospect through his vast catalogue of records and interviews. Palmieri is our most vital link between the mambo and salsa generations, a devotee of Afro-Caribbean musical traditions, and a visionary innovator across genres. He’s remixed the Beatles with cha-cha-chá, collaborated with the legendary producing duo Masters at Work, and composed the soundtrack for “Doin’ It in the Park,” a documentary about pickup basketball. He’s played live with everyone from Carlos Santana to the jazz icon Donald Harrison, and classic Palmieri tracks like “Muñeca” or “Ay Qué Rico” still dominate the dance floors of Puerto Rican family parties.

Lately, Palmieri’s been so busy that his youngest daughter, Gabriela, got him a red T-shirt quoting LL Cool J: “DON’T CALL IT A COMEBACK.” On July 18th, New York City’s public advocate proclaimed Eddie Palmieri Day, in honor of a “living legend and a trailblazer,” and he performed at Sony Hall for the occasion. In September, Palmieri played free concerts on the Boston Common and in Bryant Park. In October, Jazz at Lincoln Center inducted Palmieri into its Hall of Fame. He’s been recording new music with his band, and in a recent TV interview he winked at the possibility of a Bad Bunny collaboration (“I love carrots!”).

Palmieri can be cheeky, but he also considers himself an eternal student. His playful jam “Caminando” issues an open invitation to join this collective education: “a mi escuela yo te invito.” The story begins, he told me, with “the mighty drum,” and the African rhythmic structures that gave rise to countless genres across the Americas, from tango to ragtime. The Caribbean has long functioned as a crucial archive of ancestral practice and a major crossroads of modern musical exchange. (Jelly Roll Morton famously claimed that jazz wouldn’t be jazz without its “Spanish tinge.”) In the twentieth century, New York City became the capital of Latin music. Those displaced by the Spanish-American War and U.S. military interventions in Panama and the Dominican Republic converged on the Harlem club circuit and the nascent recording industry. Palmieri’s family had a front-row seat.

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!”

Mambo, as developed by the Cuban composer Arsenio Rodríguez, was a modern spin on nineteenth-century son, extending the genre’s improvised contrapuntal breaks known as montunos. New York’s version synthesized African percussion with swing harmonies, big-band brass, and the splashy solos of bebop. Palmieri often says that his favorite “bandstand warrior” on the scene was Spanish Harlem’s own Tito Puente, who showed off the rhythm section by pushing his timbales to the front of the stage. At thirteen, Palmieri became the timbalero in his uncle’s band. He dropped out of junior high and devoted himself to music, dragging his drums to gigs all over the Bronx. “I was just a wild stallion at that time,” he told me, laughing. But his mother, convinced he’d get a hernia, pressured him to switch back to his first instrument. Charlie had become a professional pianist. “Just look,” he remembers her saying. “Wherever he goes, there’s the piano.”

Piano had another advantage. When Charlie began touring, he recommended his kid brother to the bandleaders he’d left behind, including the Nuyorican bassist Johnnie Seguí and the Cuban singer Vicentico Valdés. In 1958, Eddie joined the renowned Tito Rodríguez Orchestra. Pachanga was the latest vogue: plush, Old World arrangements featuring violins and wooden flutes. But Eddie’s style had a harder edge. He was left-handed, which made him heavy on the piano’s lower notes, and he played with the force and feeling of a drummer. Later, he would even pound the keys with his palms and forearms. He told me that the first time he soloed with Valdés, the bandleader said that he “sounded like a nickelodeon”—an early jukebox—“no direction known.” But Eddie was taking direction: he was spending long afternoons with the band’s bongocero Manny Oquendo’s collection of Cuban dance records, trying to decode the structure of those lucid compositions. How did they climax so quickly, without ever seeming to rush? By listening, he was learning to compose his own music. He already knew how to use the piano as a drum, but now he began to understand it as a writerly instrument, capable of representing the whole orchestra.

In 1961, Palmieri formed his own band: La Perfecta. Oquendo came with him, and they linked up with a young Puerto Rican singer named Ismael Quintana, who had a poet’s feel for lyrics. One night, at a Bronx club called the Tritons, Palmieri heard a trombone so loud that it produced a buzzing vibration. Barry Rogers—tall, skinny, Jewish—had come up on Harlem’s late-night scene, moving fluently between jazz and pachanga, rhythm and blues and calypso. His chromatic harmonies hit Palmieri’s ear at an unfamiliar angle. Soon they were exchanging records (Miles Davis, Celia Cruz) and catching the John Coltrane Quartet live. Palmieri liked the distinctive fourth-chord voicings of Coltrane’s pianist, McCoy Tyner, and adapted them for Caribbean rhythms. This gave the music that Palmieri wrote for La Perfecta a restless feeling, as if it might go anywhere.

Together, Palmieri and Rogers deployed many elements that would influence the development of salsa: piercing trombones, sly social commentary, and the flexible structure of songs in live performance. “In every other band,” one critic wrote, “the arrangement is the law,” but, under Palmieri and Rogers, “all the guys have a voice in the way a tune is played.” In his solos, Palmieri might cite Mendelssohn, Sonny Stitt, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” But, no matter how far he wandered, Palmieri always made sure that the whole band was locked into the beat: “As long as there’s clave,” he still likes to say, “I can do anything I want.”

Within months, La Perfecta became one of the busiest working bands in New York City. Palmieri subscribed to Tito Puente’s philosophy—“If there is no dance, there is no music”—and he was proud to make his name by filling the floor. But the ultimate proving ground, the Palladium Ballroom, remained elusive. The Palladium, on the corner of Fifty-third and Broadway, was one of the first clubs in midtown to hire Black and Latino musicians, and soon became a major showcase for Caribbean music—not just mambo but soca from the West Indies, and the folk singer Ramito from Puerto Rico. Palmieri booked La Perfecta at a spot one block down and called people in from the street. Finally, the Palladium’s owner, Maxwell Hyman, offered the upstart band a run of ninety gigs.