Black Music Sunday is a weekly sequence highlighting all issues Black music, with over 240 tales overlaying performers, genres, historical past, and extra, every that includes its personal vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll discover some acquainted tunes and maybe an introduction to one thing new.
Get able to stand up and transfer to the rhythms evoked by Latin jazz pianist, composer, and bandleader Eddie Palmieri, as we have fun “El Maestro’s” 88th birthday.
Palmieri—a grasp of jazz, Latin jazz, and salsa, together with some sensible excursions into Latin funk—is a dwelling legend, nonetheless going robust after greater than seven a long time of performing.
In a Nov. 17 function for The New Yorker, Carinadel Valle Schorske wrote about his longevity.
Eddie Palmieri Says Don’t Name It a Comeback
The eighty-seven-year-old pianist, bandleader, and Jazz Grasp is a dwelling hyperlink between mambo and salsa—and he’s by no means been busier.On a cool evening this previous spring, the road outdoors the Blue Word ran down the block, inflicting sufficient of a scene {that a} younger man stopped to ask, “Who’s it for?” A lady in a fur coat close to the entrance shouted again, “Eddie Palmieri!” “Ah, Eddie Palmieri,” the passerby replied, “Con razón!” The eighty-seven-year-old Nuyorican pianist and bandleader has been a fixture of town’s evening life because the nineteen-fifties. Critics have referred to as 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 supervisor and his solely son, places it extra plainly: “My dad is the No. 1 Motherfucker.” As of late, Palmieri typically describes himself as “the Last of the Mohicans,” having survived a lot of his hard-living friends.
Additionally coated had been Palmieri’s Puerto Rican roots and Nuyorican beginnings.
Isabel Maldonado left Ponce by steamship in 1925, and Carlos Palmieri adopted her the subsequent yr, arriving in New York a technology earlier than town’s mid-century wave of Puerto Rican migration. Their two kids had been born in Spanish Harlem: Charlie in 1927, and Eddie in 1936. When Eddie was round 5 years previous, the household moved to the South Bronx. The neighborhood was principally German, Irish, and Jewish, and new housing initiatives had been starting to draw rural migrants from the Caribbean and the American South. Isabel thought piano classes would possibly assist maintain the boys off the streets. They went to check with Margaret Bonds, a Black American classical live performance musician with a studio on the highest flooring of Carnegie Corridor. However their coaching wasn’t solely tutorial: Isabel’s brother had a band referred to as El Chino y Su Alma Tropical, and typically the household would go right down to Harlem to document 78s. In 1949, the Palmieris opened a luncheonette referred to as El Mambo, after the Afro-Cuban music that was sweeping dance halls from Caracas to the Catskills. Palmieri instructed me that he remembers enjoying stickball out entrance 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 on the Library of Congress Music Division, Palmieri spoke about these musical beginnings.
I need to share my very own preliminary introduction to Palmieri, as a salsera—somebody who dances salsa, as I mentioned right here. In my late teenage years, my Black and Puerto Rican mates and I went out dancing a number of nights per week, hitting the entire golf equipment that featured Latin bands. These of us who lived in Queens had been members of Black American social golf equipment.
One distinguished Queens membership, The Kingsmen, had organized to have a Latin music evening at The St. Alban’s Plaza, a venue in our neighborhood. They’d deliberate to ebook Charlie Palmieri (Eddie’s older brother), however he was unavailable. Nonetheless, the reserving company countered, his youthful brother had a band that was.
The fellows within the Kingsmen had been doubtful—that they had by no means heard of Eddie. However since they’d already introduced they had been holding the occasion, they mentioned a silent prayer, and booked Eddie, who rocked the home!
Years later I interviewed Palmieri, and he remembered {that a} group of Black People had been one of many first teams to present him a shot at a significant dance gig!
Once I suppose again to these dancing days. one track stands out—not like most tunes, then or now, it was over 9 minutes of exhilaration.
From the Library of Congress:
“Azucar Pa’ Ti” (album). Eddie Palmieri. (1965)
This album pointed the best way for Latin music in the US within the Nineteen Sixties and past, and was the results of a aware effort on Palmieri’s half to seize on document the sound he and his eight piece La Perfecta band had been then serving as much as New York nightclub audiences. Although steeped within the earlier Afro-Cuban kinds that he liked, Palmieri’s band represented a number of Latin music traditions, and was significantly distinguished by the contributions of the hard-charging, Bronx-born trombonist Barry Rogers.
Right here’s “Azucar Pa’ Ti” (“Sugar for You” in English):
It’s vital to place the music and dancing into the context of the occasions, and to know how modern social situations and politics would finally have an effect on and form Palmieri’s music.
This salsa membership mapping venture, put collectively by journalist, filmmaker, and photographer Marcos Echeverría Ortiz will set the scene.
In the meantime, Palmieri was open to new musical explorations. In 1966, he teamed up with jazz vibraphonist Cal Tjader to provide the album “El Sonido Nuevo.” Right here’s the title observe:
Famend African American research scholar and historian Robert Farris Thompson weighed in with his response to the album for a evaluate by Tomás Peña for Latin Jazz Web.
“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 instance, is extraordinarily creative and “Ritmo Uni” is essentially the most completed doc of the trombone dimension in Sonido Nuevo that has but been heard. Palmieri fulfills the promise of his “Azucar” (Sugar For You) experiment in a wide range of tracks, inventing new ostinatos and melodic fragments and counter ostinatos and single-note accents, turning into a digital pianistic kaleidoscope.” –
In 1969, Palmieri would launch the album “Justicia” (“Justice”). As Fania Data notes:
Woodstock grew to become the counter tradition live performance with half 1,000,000 hippies and flower kids taking middle stage on the information. Richard Nixon was elected President whereas Simple Rider premiered within the motion pictures. The NY Mets gained the World Collection whereas the black Brazilian, “Pelé” made worldwide headlines. 747 jets made their debut within the skies. The Beatles launched their final recording collectively whereas John & Yoko performed a “bed-in” for the media. Jennifer Lopez was born 1969, the identical yr that NASA put the primary man on the moon.
Again on earth, a younger Eddie Palmieri was tormented. Featured on the left hand cowl of this groundbreaking recording sporting a knit sweater, cross-legged together with his head in his fingers, Eddie offers us music that comes from this time of transition. A pondering man’s musician, Eddie was one of many first to enter the penitentiaries bringing free music to the forgotten. He marched with Cesar Chavez and performed advantages for his and plenty of different organizations. He was among the many first to document dwell from the coed campus of Puerto Rico and performed many fund-raisers for activists that had affect on an awakening Latino group.
And as music blogger Emily Springer commented:
“Justicia” affords us greater than the inherent mixing of conventional Caribbean sounds we count on from salsa, but additionally the affect 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 difficult realities of life as a Boricua in New York. The title observe of this album, conventional in Afro-Caribbean sound, is much from conventional 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 throughout genres had been all in search of solutions to questions on race, Vietnam, and the social situation of minorities within the US. Palmieri like a number of different artists from Fania and Tico, took his second to ask the query and reckon with the fact Puerto Ricans in NYC had been dwelling by. What makes his message much more impactful for me, is the willingness to see the wrestle of Black People and Puerto Ricans as inherently linked.
Have a hear.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out. the 1973 launch of “Sentido,” which included the track “Puerto Rico”—which has turn out to be each an anthem and a love letter to the island and its individuals. Discover the lyrics and translation right here.
As beforehand famous, Palmieri, ever the innovator, has by no means been afraid to discover new musical territory. In “An Introduction to Eddie Palmieri: A Revolution on Harlem River Drive” music Professor Chris Washburne explores Palmieri’s enterprise into a brand new sound.
The head of Palmieri’s profession as a socially aware artist was the revolutionary group he co-led together with his brother Charlie, referred to as Harlem River Drive. The band was named after a freeway that cuts by Harlem, permitting automobiles to bypass the native streets of the neighborhood solely, the place the wealthy zipped previous to keep away from the tough social realities of the ghetto. For Palmieri, this freeway was an emblem of the inequalities of contemporary society. It was no accident that his group mixed Latin, soul and free jazz in a approach that sought to unify all of Harlem within the face of adversity. Palmieri’s Harlem River Drive group employed members of Aretha Franklin’s band, alongside a number of the most vital Latin musicians and jazz soloists of the day, equivalent to Ronnie Cuber, Barry Rogers and Bernard Purdie.
The venture sonically unified each black and Spanish Harlem, aligning and empowering two neighboring communities that had been struggling comparable iniquities. Stylistically, although, it lower a broad swath by Harlem, zigzagging between well-liked grooves and mashing them collectively in novel methods – from the guajira funk mixture of the title observe, to straight forward soul in “If We Had Peace Today,” to the funk guaracha mixture of “Idle Hands,” to a Bitches Brew-inspired free jazz jam in “Broken Home,” and to the funk-mambo mixture of “Seeds of Life.” Sonically the venture was approach forward of its time, though it was strongly rooted within the urgent social problems with the day.
In the long run, the venture was short-lived. Apart from a dwell recording accomplished at Sing Sing Jail, the band didn’t proceed to carry out. Regardless, its affect was lengthy lasting, inspiring many bands to discover distinctive musical mixes that might unify the voices of the individuals.
Right here’s the title observe.
Let’s fast-forward to 2016, the place we discover Palmieri returning to his earlier experiment.
Eddie Palmieri revisits Harlem River Drive on this mini-documentary
The story of a politically-charged Latin masterpiece.Recent off the tail of the fiery activism of the Black Panthers and the Younger Lords, 1971 was a hotbed of revolutionaries in search of justice, equality, and freedom. It was on this local weather that Eddie Palmieri produced one of the crucial daring albums of the period: Harlem River Drive, a document that introduced socially aware tales of the inside metropolis into the crossover arms of Latin, soul, funk and jazz.
45 years on and RBMA have produced this glorious quick movie on Eddie Palmieri and this legendary document. “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 below 13 minutes.
In 2012, Palmieri scored the music for a documentary on New York Metropolis road basketball, “Doin’ It In The Park: Pick-Up Basketball, NYC” For anybody who’s a basketball fan, the movie is a must-see. My husband was a Puerto Rican road ball participant from the Barrio, and he liked it.
Listed here are some quick movies from these periods.
In August 2016, Palmieri carried out an intimate piano solo gig for NPR Music’s “Tiny Desk Concert” sequence.
Eddie Palmieri was born in Spanish Harlem and grew up within the Bronx with a big household that nurtured his musical expertise. He studied classical piano when he was younger and gave a piano recital at Carnegie Corridor when he was simply 11. However all he needed to do at the moment was play the drums. When he was 13, he joined his uncle’s orchestra to play timbales. He later gave up the drums and began enjoying piano within the early Nineteen Fifties in varied Latin dance bands, working with Eddie Forrester, Johnny Segui and the favored Tito Rodriguez Orchestra. You’ll be able to hear his continued ardour for the sticks within the percussive vamps that pervade his discography.
Recorded in 1962, Perfecta was the primary of practically 50 albums Eddie Palmieri has launched. The Solar Of Latin Music, a groundbreaking album launched in 1975, gained him the first-ever Grammy for Greatest Latin Recording. He later went on to win 9 extra Grammys, together with a bunch of different prestigious honors.
It was an honor to have Eddie Palmieri carry out on the Tiny Desk in a particular, intimate setting — with out his traditional big-band accompaniment. We get shut sufficient to listen to him growl; you possibly can try the long-lasting sound he is been making since his early recordings. He is mentioned it is his inside spirit popping out to assist him play. The primary composition right here, “Iraida,” was written for his spouse, who died a number of years in the past. The second, “The Persian Scale,” is a uncommon deal with — a tune you will not discover on any of his recordings. The set closes with “La Libertad,” a press release on social justice and poverty from the traditional Vamonos Pa’l Monte album, launched within the early ’70s. Even with out the band, the viewers clapped and danced because the musician performed his freeform dance music, deeply rooted in stunning but easy chord adjustments and his signature Afro-Cuban rhythmic type.The Solar Of Latin Music is obtainable now:iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the…Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Solar-Latin-Musi…Set Listing:”Iraida””The Persian Scale””La Libertad”
In 2024, Palmieri continues to be going robust: He’s doing concert events, membership performances, and interviews, that are posted to his web site.
Right here’s an interview and efficiency from January.
¡Feliz 88 cumpleaños Eddie! Be a part of me within the feedback, the place we’ll proceed the celebration with tons extra!
