Eddie Palmieri’s 10 essential songs and albums

Jazz pianist Eddie Palmieri celebrates his 76th birthday by performing at the Rose Theater during Jazz at Lincoln Center, in New York, Dec. 15, 2012. A native son of the Bronx, Palmieri was a crucial innovator in New York’s Afro-Caribbean music history. The pianist, composer and bandleader has died at 88. (Karsten Moran/The New York Times)

By Ed Morales

A Nuyorican original, pianist and bandleader Eddie Palmieri began his career playing in mambo orchestras at the tail end of the Palladium era — named for the Manhattan club on West 52nd Street where crowds flocked to dance to mambo orchestras with robust horn and percussion sections — using his eclectic training on piano to drive dancers to ecstatic heights. Cutting his teeth with bandleaders like Johnny Segui and mambo king Tito Rodríguez, Palmieri formed his own band, La Perfecta, in the early 1960s. The style he pioneered in those days would be central to the evolution of a music that what would eventually be called salsa.

Ironically, Palmieri, who died Wednesday at 88, like other bandleaders of his era, disliked the term, castigating it as a catchall that obscured foundational Afro-Cuban dance rhythms like son, guaracha, guaguancó, danzón and cha cha cha. Yet La Perfecta had a new twist that helped distinguish the New York style from Cuban music: a two-trombone gut punch provided by Bronx-born Barry Rogers and Brazilian-born José Rodrigues. The trombones gave Palmieri’s band a salty tone that reflected the grind and glamour of the city’s streets and barrios, and he increasingly employed lyrics about social justice, giving salsa its distinctive flavor.

Palmieri embraced the counterculture era’s strident politics with songs like “Justicia,” played a famous gig at Sing Sing prison upstate and, departing from salsa protocol, recorded an album called “Harlem River Drive” with jazz drummer Bernard Purdie that evoked classics like War’s “The World Is a Ghetto.” He was a pianist driven by Afro-Caribbean percussion while also an acolyte of music theorist Joseph Schillinger’s mathematical approach to composition. After salsa’s peak and decline, he made several Latin jazz-themed records and recorded with younger singers like La India and Calle 13’s Ilé. He remained committed to New York’s Black and Latino community, never losing his love for his beginnings.

Here are 10 essential examples of Palmieri’s 60-plus years of recorded work.

‘Azúcar’

From a 1965 recording with his original group, La Perfecta, “Azúcar” is a hard-driving, jazz-inflected anthem for the nascent sound of salsa. Featuring the brash virtuosity of the Rogers-Rodrigues trombone combo, Ismael Quintana’s distinctive vocals, Manny Oquendo’s precision percussion and Palmieri’s double-time piano pounding, it goes from call-and-response to blissful jam session. Although Celia Cruz sealed the deal years later, Palmieri establishes azúcar (Spanish for sugar, the Caribbean’s main export) as Afro-Caribbean music’s code word for sonic pleasure.

‘Que Suene la Orquesta’

From the 1965 “Mozambique” album, which trades on late-period mambo with hints of pseudo-bugaloo, this track serves as Palmieri’s most potent early calling card. Using the piano as a translator of Afro-Cuban percussion lines, Palmieri furiously sets the pace for a series of conga and timbale solos, while the dual trombones honk like a stream of taxis filled with passengers late for the dance.

‘El Sonido Nuevo’ and ‘Bamboléate’ with Cal Tjader

These mid-’60s recordings with West Coast vibist Cal Tjader are sublime evocations of a largely forgotten moment in Latin music history. The chill of Tjader’s Latin-style vibraphone evokes a kind of fever-dream transcendence.

‘Justicia’

The title track to his 1969 experimental Latin/R&B fusion album, “Justicia” (“Justice”) sets the standard for salsa’s emblematic focus on socially conscious lyrics. Quintana’s plaintive vocals set off a firestorm of a chorus section, with Palmieri battling with percussion and trombones. The song is a fitting soundtrack for the encroaching 1970s, where Nuyorican urban politics became inseparable from a rumba dance session.

‘Eddie Palmieri Recorded Live at Sing Sing’ with Harlem River Drive

While many of salsa’s stars — Willie Colón, Johnny Pacheco, Ray Barretto — participated in the early ’60s bugaloo phase of New York Latin music, Palmieri maintained his focus on R&B and soul into the early ’70s. His Harlem River Drive recordings anticipated Latin-funk fusion, and the “Live at Sing Sing” albums were made in solidarity with those imprisoned there, just after the infamous Attica disturbances of 1971. The first disc includes a cameo poetry reading by Felipe Luciano, a central figure in the Young Lords and the seminal Last Poets.

‘The Sun of Latin Music’

One of the early classics of salsa, “The Sun of Latin Music” has a concept album feel, its songs playing like a suite of syncopated psychedelic ambience. Tracks like “Nada de Ti” and “Deseo Salvaje” are as danceable as they are soothing. “Una Rosa Española” features then-new vocalist Lalo Rodríguez (who went on to ’80s salsa romántica fame), at one point crooning over a loose translation of the Beatles’ “You Never Give Me Your Money.”

‘Vámonos Pa’l Monte’

A strikingly engineered recording that captures the echoes of live performance and an almost Augustus Pablo dub feel, “Vámonos Pa’l Monte” is electric and eccentric at once (check Palmieri’s brother Charlie’s spacey electric organ solo on the title track). Expanding from his La Perfecta roots, Palmieri goes long-form, enlisting the exquisite Cuba-to-Harlem trumpeter Chocolate Armenteros, saxophonist Ronnie Cuber and percussionist Nicky Marrero to create this visceral masterpiece.

‘Sentido’

Its title literally centering “Feeling,” this 1972 album feels like Palmieri’s most ambitious and mature, as the early raucousness of La Perfecta evolves into a kind of magisterial urban danzón orchestra without losing any of its edge. It features two Palmieri anthems: “Puerto Rico,” which celebrates the island with sentiment and scintillating, echoing piano-trombone cacophony, and “Adoración,” which transitions from wah wah guitar to a full-on salsa jam led by Quintana’s vocal pyrotechnics.

‘Sueño’

An overlooked classic from 1989, “Sueño” was released as a jazz recording in which Palmieri is allowed to indulge in his most impressionist, Debussy-shadowing tendencies. Producer Kip Hanrahan and engineer Jon Fausty create a sonic whirlwind that features both jazz and salsa tracks, including a remake of “Azúcar.” It’s worth hearing just for percussionist Milton Cardona’s hypnotizing work.

‘La Perfecta II,’ ‘Listen Here!’ and ‘Sabiduría’

Like Tito Puente, Palmieri understood that jazz was at the core of his musical being, and increasingly recorded jazz-oriented albums in his later years as salsa’s flame flickered. “La Perfecta II” from 2002 reimagined his 1960s project with younger Latin jazz players like Conrad Herwig, Mario Rivera and Dave Valentín. “Listen Here!” (2005) covers Thelonious Monk, Horace Silver and Chano Pozo, and “Sabiduría” (“Wisdom,” from 2017) proves Palmieri’s creative genius was still intact even after turning 80.