Eddie Palmieri celebrates his 75th at The Blue Note

Grammy-winning pianist and bandleader Eddie Palmieri is a marvelous storyteller.

And that should come as no surprise considering the Latin jazz great is about to launch a six-night gig at the Blue Note Tuesday to celebrate his 75th birthday.

Of course, ask him about that milestone and he may try to convince you that somehow it just can’t be.

“The math doesn’t add up. I’ve been on the bandstand 55 years,” Palmieri says. “The great Cuban trumpet player Alfredo (Chocolate) Armenteros taught me that after 50, you starting counting from one again. So, at 25, I feel great!”

The nine-time Grammy Award winner was born in Spanish Harlem to parents who moved to New York from Puerto Rico. His family, including his older brother Charlie, another renowned Latin piano giant, grew up in the Bronx.

Palmieri talks of those days with historical anecdotes filled with passion and fond memory.

“For me, everything was the Latin dance music, which started with the great Machito Orchestra in 1939. And when the great arranger and pianist, René Hernandez, was brought in from Cuba in approximately 1946, he took the Machito Orchestra to another level. He was truly a genius and I considered him a musical godfather.

“And by 1949, Tito Puente had started his conjunto,” continues Palmieri. “He and my brother Charlie were friends already and remained so until Charlie's death, at the age of 60, in 1988. Tito’s conjunto brought the rhythm section upfront and put the trumpets in the back.”

His name-dropping is head-spinning, weaving in tales of Tito Rodriguez, Mario Bauza, Noro Morales, Chano Pozo and Dizzy Gillespie, a father of the bebop style in jazz, and a further bridge between black American jazz and Latin American music.

The musical matrimony that became known as Latin Jazz was consummated at halls of legend such as the Palladium Ballroom, located on 53rd and Broadway from 1948 to 1966.

“Birdland, the club named after Charlie Parker, was right down the block from the Palladium,” he recalls as the site of the “interchange of the Latin listening to the jazz and the jazz listening to the Latin. By 1949, the Palladium was the greatest ballroom dance hall you've ever seen. Four nights a week, different crowds every night, on Sundays a black audience.”

Those who view the interaction of the dancers and the dance bands as solely a romantic story are in for a surprise.

“The dancers were the real enemy to me,” Palmieri says, seriously. “The question was who was going to knock who out, the band or the dancers. Eventually I recorded ‘Azúcar Pa Ti.’”

News Update