He roped salsa into conversation with jazz, rock, funk and even modern classical music. “A new world music,” one critic said, “is being born.”
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, N.J. 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, Mr. 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, Mr. 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 the 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.
Mr. 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 the 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Palmieri had been “the pioneer and prime innovator” driving the “cultural movement” that was salsa music.
For his part, Mr. 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 Mr. 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 received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Latin Grammys.
Though he never graduated from high school, Mr. Palmieri was an endlessly curious and intensely intellectual man. He treated leading a band as both an art and a science, particularly after learning the Schillinger System of musical composition in the late 1960s. “What I learned intuitively — why it works, or why it excites you — now I learned it scientifically, from what I was able to capture from the Schillinger System,” he told the Smithsonian. “That has to do with rotary energy. That has to do with tension and resistance.”
One of his catchphrases was “I don’t guess I’m going to excite you with my band. I know it.”
Mr. 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. At times that meant 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,” Mr. 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 Mr. Palmieri had studied, that income tax was a legalized form of robbery.
Mr. 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 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 led Mr. Palmieri to be known as “the Madman of Salsa.” He looked the part onstage, sometimes jagging the piano keys with elbows and forearms, lunging and crying out, broadcasting catharsis.
In cooler moments he played without moving his head or shoulders at all, holding his body threateningly still, as if stalking his prey from deep grass. He would lightly growl as he held a stubborn ostinato or chased an arpeggio into the air. Before long he would be throwing himself at the instrument again, while remaining keenly aware of the ensemble.