By Nick Madigan
BALTIMORE SUN
Decades ago, long before he became a powerhouse of Latin jazz and salsa, Eddie Palmieri was fired from a band for hitting the piano keys too hard.
"It was the best thing that ever happened to me," Palmieri, 70, said in a recent interview from his New York home. His dismissal, while upsetting at the time, propelled him into another band that taught him the intricacies of Cuban music.
"Cuba was always ahead in the different forms of music in the '20s, '30s and '40s, and all the dances came from there - rumba, cha cha, guaracha," said Palmieri, whose band comes to the Kimmel Center on March 2.
If Palmieri's piano playing is less violent than it was, it has lost none of its passion. Reviews for his latest album with jazz trumpet player Brian Lynch, his longtime collaborator, have been uniformly positive. This month, the album, Simpatico, was nominated for a Grammy award; if it wins at the Feb. 11 ceremony in Los Angeles, it would be Palmieri's ninth Grammy.
Such laurels were a world removed when Palmieri, who was born in New York's Spanish Harlem of Puerto Rican parents, began, at his mother's urging, taking piano lessons. He applied himself to the task, but it was the sounds in the streets, mostly Cuban mambo, that set his heart beating.
"There was music blasting out of every window, from commercial radio," Palmieri recalled of those days. "You could hear it from the bodegas while we'd be playing ball outside."
Palmieri, who took a detour into drums, and his brother, Charlie, who was nine years older and played the piano, began winning talent contests. The older boy was later hired by legendary bandleader Tito Puente, and his little brother sometimes sat in on Charlie's recording sessions, playing claves - two round, wooden sticks that are struck together for a rhythmic crack.
While prodigiously talented as a pianist, Palmieri did not - contrary to legend and his own Web site - make his performance debut at Carnegie Hall at the age of 11. He said that he played next door, in the Weil Recital Hall, and then only for an evaluation of his abilities, not as a concert.
However, Palmieri did join an uncle's band when he was 13, playing the timbales, shallow drums with metal shells. He began his professional career as a pianist in the early 1950s, and in 1961, he formed his own group, Conjunto La Perfecta. Palmieri showed his innovative spirit by hiring a trombone section in place of trumpets, a practice soon widely imitated.
"It was difficult to get trumpet players at that time to stay with a group," Palmieri said. "So I got one trombone and then another one. It was extremely unusual. After that, all the trombones came out of the pawnshops."
Palmieri's rising fame, and his exploration of Latin music's connections to jazz, elevated him to the rank of jazz greats such as Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner and Miles Davis, some critics say. In 1988, the Smithsonian Institution recorded a pair of Palmieri's concerts for the archive of the National Museum of American History in Washington.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Lee Morgan: His Life, Music and Culture
A new book about Lee Morgan is available by Tom Perchard: Lee Morgan: His Life, Music and Culture.