Palmieri plays jazz with a Latin touch

Dec. 20--Decades ago, long before he became a powerhouse of Latin jazz and salsa, Eddie Palmieri was fired from a band for hitting the piano keys too hard.

"It was the best thing that ever happened to me," Palmieri, 70, said in an interview yesterday from his New York home. His dismissal, while upsetting at the time, propelled him into another band that taught him the intricacies of Cuban music.

"Cuba was always ahead in the different forms of music in the '20s, '30s and '40s, and all the dances came from there -- rumba, cha cha, guaracha," said Palmieri, who is scheduled to play Friday and Saturday at An die Musik alongside the renowned jazz trumpeter Brian Lynch, his longtime collaborator.

If Palmieri's piano playing is less violent than it was, it has lost none of its passion. Reviews for the pair's latest album, Simpatico, on which they are backed by a 20-piece band, have been uniformly positive. This month, the album was nominated for a Grammy Award; if it wins at the Feb. 11 ceremony in Los Angeles, it will be Palmieri's ninth Grammy.

Such laurels were a world removed when Palmieri, who was born in New York's Spanish Harlem to Puerto Rican parents, began taking piano lessons at his mother's urging. He applied himself to the task, but it was the sounds in the streets, mostly Cuban mambo, that set his heart beating.

"There was music blasting out of every window, from commercial radio," Palmieri recalled of those early days. "You could hear it from the bodegas while we'd be playing ball outside."

Palmieri, who took a detour into drums, and his brother, Charlie, who was nine years older and played the piano, began winning talent contests. The older boy was later hired by the legendary bandleader Tito Puente, and his little brother sometimes sat in on Charlie's recording sessions, playing claves -- two round, wooden sticks that are struck together for a rhythmic crack.

While prodigiously talented as a pianist, Palmieri did not -- contrary to well-established legend and his own Web site -- make his debut at Carnegie Hall at age 11. To set the record straight, he said yesterday that he played next door, in the Weil Recital Hall, and then only for an evaluation of his abilities, not as a concert.

However, Palmieri did join an uncle's band when he was 13, playing the timbales, shallow drums with metal shells. He began his professional career as a pianist in the early 1950s, and in 1961 he formed his own group, Conjunto La Perfecta. Palmieri showed his innovative spirit by hiring a trombone section in place of trumpets, a practice soon widely emulated.

"It was difficult to get trumpet players at that time to stay with a group," Palmieri said. "So I got one trombone and then another one. It was extremely unusual. After that, all the trombones came out of the pawn shops."

The sound of the two trombones in Palmieri's group -- which included flute, percussion, bass and a vocalist -- prompted fans to call it "the band with the crazy roaring elephants."

Palmieri's rising fame and his exploration of Latin music's connections to jazz elevated him to the rank of jazz greats such as Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner and Miles Davis, many critics believe. In 1988, the Smithsonian Institution recorded a pair of Palmieri's concerts for the archives of the National Museum of American History in Washington.

His playing inspires almost religious respect. The New York Times critic Ben Ratliff, reviewing a Palmieri/Lynch performance on Nov. 16 at the Iridium Jazz Club in Manhattan, wrote that in the pianist's rendition of "Guajira Dubois," from the new album, he played with "enormous density."

"When he soloed in the tune," Ratliff wrote, "he made the music heave forward and then would stop completely, letting the rest of the band rush into his silence. When he returned, he built up so much intensity and presence with left-hand rhythm that he seemed absolutely free to do what he wanted with his right."

For Lynch, who has collaborated, if his memory serves, on nine albums with Palmieri, the pianist has been "one of the biggest musical mentors of my life."

"Jazz is very much wrapped around what he does," Lynch said. "It has the improvisational looseness and spirit of jazz all the way through it."

Latin music like Palmieri's, Lynch said, "brings back aspects of jazz's potential as dance music that went away after the swing era."

Although Palmieri is in the midst of a concert tour in which he occasionally uses a full band, he recognizes that, in Latin music, the concept is sometimes considered a thing of the past.

"After 1960, everything changed for the big orchestras," he said, "and now we're coming to Baltimore as a duo."

Then, poking fun at the idea of a two-man show, he said, "In the middle of the set I'll probably get off the stage, sit down and listen to the band for a while."

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