Some 20 years ago I watched as Eddie Palmieri approached his piano, noting how his features radiated a mix of joy and excitement. As soon as he began to play I grasped why. To say the great Puerto Rican New Yorker was a thrilling performer is an understatement: seated at the piano he threw himself into playing explosive Latin jazz, his rhythmic attack reminding me how his first job as a professional musician was playing timbales in his uncle’s band aged 13. This sense of joy, the excitement he found in making music, the chances he took, helped shape Eddie Palmieri’s long, brilliant career.
To my mind, Palmieri was one of the truly revolutionary figures of postwar American music, up there with Muddy and Miles and Aretha and Dolly: a musician who reshaped a genre and extended the music’s possibilities. “El Maestro” is how his fans and fellow musicians referred to Eddie, and this human hurricane, built like a fire hydrant with the brightest smile and a mischievous twinkle in his eye, never disappointed.
