Eddie Palmieri, Latin music’s dynamic innovator, dies at 88
- The San Juan Daily Star
- Aug 8, 2025
- 7 min read
By Giovanni Russonello
Eddie Palmieri, a pianist, composer and bandleader whose contributions to Afro-Caribbean music helped usher in the golden age of salsa in New York City, and whose far-reaching career established him as one of the great musical masterminds of the 20th century — not to mention one of its fieriest performers — died on Wednesday at his home in Hackensack, New Jersey. He was 88.
His youngest daughter, Gabriela Palmieri, confirmed the death, which she said came after “an extended illness.”
From the moment he founded his first steady band, the eight-piece La Perfecta, in 1961, Eddie Palmieri drove many of the stylistic shifts and creative leaps in Latin music. That group brought new levels of economy and jazz influence to a mambo scene that was just beginning to lose steam after its postwar boom, and it set the standard for what would become known as salsa. From there, he never stopped innovating.
In the 1970s, Palmieri roped salsa into conversation with jazz, rock, funk and even modern classical music on a series of highly regarded albums, including “Vamonos Pa’l Monte” and “The Sun of Latin Music,” as well as with fusion band Harlem River Drive. He also teamed up with thoroughbred jazz musicians — Cal Tjader, Brian Lynch and Donald Harrison among them — making essential contributions to the subgenre of Latin jazz.
Palmieri’s fundamental tools, he once said in an interview, were the “complex African rhythmic patterns that are centuries old” and that lie at the root of Afro-Cuban music. “The intriguing thing for me is to layer jazz phrasings and harmony on top of those patterns,” he said. Explaining where he got his knack for dense and dissonant harmonies and his gleefully contrarian sense of rhythm, he cited jazz pianists like McCoy Tyner and Thelonious Monk as inspirations.
But art historian and critic Robert Farris Thompson, writing in 1975 about the emergence of salsa, noticed other influences as well. “He blends avant-garde rock, Debussy, John Cage and Chopin without overwhelming the basic Afro-Cuban flavor,” he wrote of Palmieri. “A new world music, it might be said, is being born.”
Juan Flores, a scholar of Puerto Rican culture, wrote in “Salsa Rising: New York Latin Music of the Sixties Generation” (2016) that Palmieri had been “the pioneer and prime innovator” driving the “cultural movement” that was salsa music.
For his part, Palmieri was never fond of the word “salsa.” He described his music in terms of its roots: “Afro-Cuban,” he said in a 2012 interview with the Smithsonian Oral History Project. Through the participation of Puerto Ricans and Nuyoricans like himself, he explained, it had become “Afro-Caribbean. And now it’s Afro-world.”
By the end of his life Palmieri was a highly decorated statesman in both jazz and Afro-Latin music. In 2013 he was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts and a received Lifetime Achievement Award at the Latin Grammys.
Palmieri considered himself an ambassador of New York’s working-class and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, where he’d grown up playing stickball and dishing out egg creams at his father’s ice cream parlor. An ambassador, sure — but he could hardly be accused of acting like a diplomat: He lived by his own code, tangling often with music executives or institutions he found to be unfair or dealing in unsavory methods. That could mean confronting one of the most mobbed-up executives in American music over unpaid royalties.
“You’re getting attacked constantly, one way or the other: fights with the promoters, fighting with the record labels,” Palmieri said. “So I went through all of this.”
For years he refused to pay taxes to the Internal Revenue Service, embracing the view of Henry George, an iconoclastic political economist whose ideas Palmieri had studied, that income tax was a legalized form of robbery.
Palmieri later used his eminent reputation to agitate successfully for greater inclusion of Latin music at the Grammys. The winner of eight trophies himself, he served for years as a member of the Recording Academy’s New York board of governors, helping to shepherd the creation of the best Latin jazz album category in 1995.
When that category was eliminated in 2011, he wrote a letter accusing the academy of “marginalizing our music, culture and people even further.” The category was reinstated the next year.
But it wasn’t just a reputation for resistance that earned Palmieri the nickname “the Madman of Salsa.” He looked the part onstage, sometimes jagging the piano keys with elbows and forearms, lunging and crying out, broadcasting catharsis.
The pianist who proudly described himself as a “Puerto Rican of Italian descent, born in a New York Jewish hospital, who composes and plays Afro-Caribbean music” was born Eduardo Palmieri on Dec. 15, 1936, in New York. He was the second of two sons of Isabel Palmieri Maldonado, a seamstress, and Carlos Manuel Palmieri, a radio and television repairman. Both were from Ponce, Puerto Rico.
When Eddie was 5, his family moved to the South Bronx, where his father opened a candy store and ice cream parlor in a heavily Puerto Rican neighborhood. Young Eddie got to name it: the Mambo.
The shop became a hangout for young musicians, and while he was serving up sodas, Eddie also controlled the jukebox, playing the latest hits by Tito Puente, Tito Rodríguez and Machito, the city’s leading Latin bandleaders.
When Eddie began studying the piano at age 8, his brother Charlie, nine years his senior, was already playing it professionally. Charlie went on to study at Juilliard and joined Tito Puente’s orchestra on his way to becoming a popular bandleader himself.
The brothers would collaborate frequently until Charlie’s death, of a heart attack, in 1988. In 2014, partly thanks to Eddie’s advocacy, New York City declared the corner of East 112th Street and Park Avenue, where the brothers had grown up, Charlie Palmieri Way.
In addition to his daughter Gabriela, Eddie Palmieri is survived by three other daughters, Renee, Eydie and Ileana; a son, Edward Palmieri II; and four grandchildren. His wife of 58 years, Iraida (González) Palmieri, died in 2014.
Palmieri joined Cuban singer Vicentico Valdés’ ensemble in 1956, the same year he married Iraida González, who would be by his side for the next 58 years. He spent the first two years of their marriage in Tito Rodríguez’s orchestra, a mainstay at the Palladium Ballroom, the heart of New York’s mambo scene.
Taking a leap of faith, Palmieri left Rodríguez in 1960 to put together his own ensemble. He called the band La Perfecta.
Invited by producer Al Santiago to record for his influential Alegre label, Palmieri convened a series of recording sessions.
The album, “Conjunto La Perfecta,” became the talk of New York City north of 96th Street, and then a landmark in Latin music, perhaps the closest thing there was to an opening bell for the salsa movement.
La Perfecta released a second album in 1963: “El Molestoso,” whose title translates loosely as “the nuisance.” Palmieri proved a crafty nuisance that year when the Palladium’s management was refusing to hire La Perfecta. He booked himself gigs at a dance hall across the street and stood outside before shows, daring concertgoers on their way to hear Tito Puente or Tito Rodríguez to come check out La Perfecta instead: “Not there, folks! Over here, folks!”
He wore down the ballroom’s management, and La Perfecta was booked for an extended run at the Palladium. The band played until the ballroom’s closing night in 1966.
The dancers at the ballroom were known to be as formidable as the bands, and Palmieri came to see the couples that swung about the floor as “the enemy” in a war of attrition. “Who’s going to knock who out?” he said in a 2012 interview, remembering his approach. “When I come and play ‘Azúcar,’ the word would spread: If you intend to dance this composition, wait till after the piano solo because you’ll never make it!”
The track was released on the LP “Azúcar Pa’ Ti” in 1965, the same year as Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”; both played a part in challenging the time constraints of commercial radio. Clocking in at 8 1/2 minutes, “Azúcar” became a hit, and listeners called in to complain if disc jockeys didn’t play the whole thing.
In 2009, the track was added to the National Recording Registry as a landmark of American culture.
Palmieri, who took classes part time at the alternative-minded Henry George School of Social Science, was among the first major salsa artists to put strong political messages in music. In 1969, soon after disbanding La Perfecta, he released “Justicia,” one of his most lasting and ambitious albums, with vocalists Ismael Quintana and Justo Betancourt delivering melodic chants over a large ensemble’s hard-charging salsa arrangements, flights of avant-garde improvising and “West Side Story” balladry.
Palmieri never stopped performing and recording. In his last decades he split his efforts between a Latin jazz octet; La Perfecta II, a revival of his original band; and the full-size Salsa Orchestra, featuring vocalist Hermán Olivera. With his spongelike memory and curious, critical mind, he also never stopped seeking out knowledge of the roots and shoots of his music.
As he told the Smithsonian in 2012, “I try constantly to get even more information,” and to pass it on to the public. “Whenever I am able to relate, I do, because it’s so important, our genre. I love it so much. It put the world to dance.”
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