Eddie Palmieri, the avant-garde pianist, composer and bandleader who was one of the most innovative artists of rumba and Latin jazz, has died aged 88. Fania Records announced his death on Wednesday evening. Palmieri's daughter Gabriela told the New York Times that her father died earlier that day at his home in New Jersey after an extended illness.
Palmieri was the first Latino to win a Grammy award, in 1975 for the album The Sun of Latin Music, and he would win seven more over a career that spanned nearly 40 albums. He kept releasing music into his 80s, even performing through the early coronavirus pandemic via livestreams.
Born in New York's Spanish Harlem in 1936, Palmieri began studying piano at an early age, but at 13 he started playing timbales in his uncle's orchestra. He eventually returned to piano, later saying: 'I'm a frustrated percussionist, so I take it out on the piano.' In 1961, he formed his own band, La Perfecta, which was the first to feature a trombone section instead of trumpets in Latin music.
Palmieri produced several albums on the Alegre and Tico Records labels, including the 1971 classic Vámonos Pa'l Monte with his brother Charlie. His 1971 album Harlem River Drive fused Black and Latin styles, incorporating salsa, funk, soul and jazz. In 1974, he recorded The Sun of Latin Music with a young Lalo Rodríguez, which became the first Latin production to win a Grammy.
Palmieri was instrumental in creating the best Latin jazz album category at the Grammys in 1995. When the category was eliminated in 2011, he accused the academy of 'marginalizing our music, culture and people even further'; it was reinstated the following year. He won two more Grammys in the 1980s for Palo Pa' Rumba (1984) and Solito (1985), and his 2000 album Masterpiece with Tito Puente won two Grammys.
Throughout his career, Palmieri performed with the Fania All-Stars and Tico All-Stars, and worked with musicians such as timbalero Nicky Marrero, bassist Israel 'Cachao' López, trumpeter Alfredo 'Chocolate' Armenteros, trombonist Lewis Khan and Puerto Rican bassist Bobby Valentín. In 1988, the Smithsonian Institution recorded two of his concerts for the National Museum of American History. Yale University awarded him the Chubb fellowship in 2002, an honour usually reserved for international heads of state, for his work in building communities through music.
