The irrepressible Eddie Palmieri had to cancel his appearance at the South Beach Jazz Festival but his music and its spirit were well represented. (Photo courtesy of artist management)
Health issues forced pianist, composer, and bandleader Eddie Palmieri, 88, to cancel his scheduled appearance at the South Beach Jazz Festival. But, his music and his profound impact on salsa and Afro-Cuban Jazz will be well represented in the tribute celebration at the Miami Beach Bandshell, on Saturday, Jan. 11.
The concert will be anchored by Sonido Solar, a tribute band endorsed by Palmieri, featuring Louis Fouché, the show’s music director, on alto saxophone, Luques Curtis on bass, Vicente “Little Johnny” Rivero on congas, Camilo Molina on drums, and GRAMMY-nominated and Palmieri’s mentee Zaccai Curtis on piano. Two long-time Palmieri collaborators, trumpeter Brian Lynch, and trombonist Conrad Herwig, key players on Palmieri’s 1990s milestones such as “Palmas,” “La Perfecta II,” “Vortex,” and “Arete,” will join as special guests, adding historical perspective to a celebration of a remarkable career.
Over more than six decades, Palmieri has claimed a one-of-a-kind place in Afro-Caribbean music. He is an avant-gardist with a traditionalist’s heart who, leading salsa orchestras or jazz bands, has found ways of negotiating the demands of the dancers on the dance floor and the expectations of his dedicated listeners. He rarely disappointed them.
Dancers could set their watches to Palmieri’s implacable tumbaos on his left hand, but then, he would take a piano solo and set out to probe the boundaries of the song, punctuating the phrases with dissonant clusters and unexpected turns, challenging the orchestra and the soloists to build castles over the rhythm section. Dancing to experimentation rarely sounded more natural.
“Well, it’s a struggle: the dancer against the orchestra,” Palmieri told me in an interview in New York some years ago. “That’s how I learned this music; that’s how I play it now, and that’s how it will always be for me. We must push forward. We must always try to extend, to explore, to better what we have. If not, we might as well just sit around and wait for death.”
In fact, in Palmieri’s music, the line between Afro-Caribbean jazz and dance music, call it salsa if you must, often blurs — and after all, jazz was not that long ago popular dance music.
“Dance is the essence of our work,” said Palmieri. “This is music for the people, to make people dance. It’s up to the artist what he wants to put on top, where he takes it, but we are dance orchestras first — and we must never forget that.”
Herwig’s trombone career strides the line between jazz and Afro-Caribbean music. It’s an approach best illustrated by his successful series of recordings, “The Latin Side of … “ in which Herwig reimagines the music and styles of jazz masters such as John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, and McCoy Tyner within an Afro-Caribbean framework.
“Think of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford. They were all dance bands,” notes Herwig. “When we play concerts with Eddie, hundreds of people will surround the stage to hear the solos and the interaction between musicians up close— and then behind them, there’ll be hundreds of people dancing, feeling the rhythm, listening with their feet.”
Herwig believes Palmieri’s genius is how he can excite the dancer and the listener.
“Now, that’s the fusion of the 21st century: bringing together people who don’t care about dance but love jazz and people who don’t care about jazz but love to dance. One of the highlights of my career is playing John Coltrane’s music and having people dance to it — and that idea comes from Eddie Palmieri.”
Herwig is not just a trusted collaborator for Palmieri. Their long, close association transcends the mere professional (Palmieri is the godfather of Herwig’s son), and Herwig recalls having “many conversations with Eddie about why it must be mutually exclusive? Why would you have to have something popular and danceable separate from something intellectually challenging and pleasing? Why can’t you have both?”
Lynch, a two-time Grammy-winning player, arranger, and bandleader with an extensive career that includes stints with Horace Silver, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, and saxophonist Phil Woods, concurs.
Brian Lynch’s photo courtesy of Tomoji Hirakata
“I’ve played with Eddie in his dance orchestra, I played with him in his Latin jazz groups, and I’ve seen people dancing to Latin jazz, “says Lynch, a frequent musical partner of Herwig in the trombonist’s “Latin side” series. “Perhaps the difference would be that Latin jazz would be instrumental, without a singer.”
Fouché is the co-founder with the Curtis brothers and trumpeter Jonathan Powell of Sonido Solar, the core band in this tribute. All four were members of Palmieri’s band and Fouché says “If you look at the history of Eddie’s bands, he’s always had a really keen eye for finding and developing young talent. So, it’s a huge honor to be a part of this current generation.” Sonido Solar, the name alludes to Palmieri’s moniker “The Sun of Latin Music,” was founded to “very explicitly pay tribute to Eddie and his approach to delivering this music.” Palmieri endorsed the band and played on two tracks of Sonido Solar’s debut album, released in 2022.
Saxophonist Louis Fouché, founding member of Sonido Solar, will be the music director of The South Beach Jazz Festival tribute concert to Eddie Palmieri. Photo courtesy of Joseph Schembri.
“One thing Eddie says, and he’s very proud of it, is that his start was as a dance orchestra leader, and everything that he does is danceable, whether it’s instrumental or there are vocals in it. And that’s what he lives by,” says Fouché, who has performed with Palmieri since 2010.
He says having the chance to perform with Eddie was a dream for him.
“I always loved his compositions, the energy he transmits, and how it hit my spirit,” he says. As a listener first and then on the bandstand, Fouche found Palmieri’s overall approach “fascinating.”
“He takes a lot of risks and takes the music in very interesting directions,” says Fouché. “But the core, the rhythmic core, the structural core of the compositions is always there. If it’s not there, he doesn’t want it. You’ll hear (in his music) the same ingredients of those 1940s records he idolizes. And it’s a really cool thing because it’s a combination: it feels rooted — but then it also feels like it’s in outer space sometimes, and he’s found a really unique way of doing that.”
While discussing Afro-Cuban jazz, Palmieri laid out his views decades ago.
(Eddie Palmieri’s photo courtesy of artist management)
“You can’t just say you know the tradition, or you respect it. You must understand it,” he told me emphatically during an interview. “Those who say that it doesn’t matter never got it to begin with. You must understand la clave (the basic rhythmic pattern in Afro-Cuban music), and you must understand the dance patterns. Every rhythm had a step — the mambo, the cha cha cha, the guaracha — and everybody knew how to dance it. It was an art. Then you put the harmonic advances of jazz with those rhythmic patterns from Africa that have been with us for centuries, and you don’t need anything else. You have the strongest, most complex, beautiful music on earth.”
This preview was first published in Artburst Miami on Thursday, Jan 9
If you’ve heard any of the previous Jazz With an Accent shows, you know they are usually loosely structured around a theme. I find it a practical way to present the work of artists from disparate backgrounds and traditions exploring a common idea.
The next segment has a distinct Cuban accent. Panamanian pianist Danilo Perez and his trio, featuring bassist Ben Street and drummer Adam Cruz, heard live at the Jazz Showcase in 2015, reframe Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodriguez’s standard “Rabo de Nube.” Meanwhile, singer and songwriter Daymé Arocena, one of the most compelling young vocalists to emerge from Cuba in recent years, sets “Cry Me a River” as a rumba guaguancó that flows naturally into the rumba “Xiomara,” sung in Spanish, in her 2015 EP Havana Cultura Sessions.
As a bookend for a program that started with probings of the music of Thelonious Monk, we’ll visit Duke Ellington’s legacy: “Mood Indigo” in a slow-paced, brooding version by Spanish pianist Albert Sanz and his trio, and a tango reimagining of “In a Sentimental Mood” by Argentine pianist and composer Gustavo Beytelmann, a former Piazzolla sideman and long-time Paris resident. This track is from the album Tango a la Duke, featuring a program of tango versions of Ellington’s classics by Beytelmann and his trio comprising the late Juan Jose Mosalini, bandoneón, and Roberto Tormo, double bass.
Jazz With an Accent 