HOT SALSA : Eddie Palmieri

CD selection :

Live at Sing Sing
(Tico ; 1972)

The Sun of Latin music
(Coco ; 1974)

Sueño
(Intuition ; 1990)

Salsa brava
(compil.Charly ; 1993)

Palmas
(Elektra ; 1994)

Sample from
Café
in
El Rumbero del piano
(RMM)

To order

With Eddie Palmieri, we realize that piano is a percussion. His concerts are a combat between the instrument and himself, releasing a powerful salsa related to jazz, where his creative imagination is spread out in an energetic duel with the piano.

For Eddie Palmieri, born in New York in 1936 from Puertorican parents, always considered himself as a percussionnist : from childhood he studies timbales and trades in his dear percussions against piano only under the family pressure (percussions not being regarded as "well-bred instruments") all this mingled with health problems. At fifteen he thus turns definitively, much to his regret, towards piano, but this driven back percussionnist will keep a taste for physical action.This dare-devil conjures up a fiery personal style that really knocks out.

His music and concerts are up to the image of this Titan, brutal and virtuoso, always risking explosion due to overheating. Nicknamed " Rompe Teclas " - the one who breaks the piano keys -, he got a band that punches, with musicians the boss leaves free to develop their musical ideas in risky chorus. Venturing on the grounds of modal jazz or practicing a more traditional salsa, for Eddie Palmieri, every night, the stage is a boxing ring.

		EDDIE PALMIERI USA One says that at the age when a boy kisses his first girls, young Eddie was dismissed from the band where he was raging for spoiling the piano keys while playing with too much strength.