How fantastic is this! Eddie Palmieri’s music instantly puts a smile on your face, fills you with joy, and makes you want to start dancing.

A master of Latin jazz, rumba and salsa since the mid-’50s, “El Maestro” made loads of ground-breaking albums and became the first Latino to win a Grammy – adding eight more over the course of a career spanning seven decades and nearly 40 albums.

He was still recording as recently as 2017 when he released what would be his final album, Sabiduria, at the age of 80, and he carried on performing with livestreams during the early part of the coronavirus pandemic.

Born in New York’s South Bronx to Puerto Rican parents, Palmieri followed in the footsteps of his older brother Charlie, seen playing with him in the clip below. 

He started studying classical piano technique at the age of eight and made his debut at Carnegie Hall when he was 11 before – kids being kids – he quit the piano at 13 and became infatuated with drums.

By 15 he’d returned to piano, where he remained, developing a distinctive style that melded Afro-Caribbean rhythms to modern jazz, influenced primarily by Thelonius Monk and McCoy Tyner.

His interlude as a drummer stayed with him and influenced his style: “I’m a frustrated percussionist,” he said in his autobiography, “so I take it out on the piano.”

Palmieri made his professional debut with Johnny Segui’s orchestra in 1955 and joined Tito Rodriguez’s popular band in 1958, before forming his own ensemble, Conjunto La Perfecta, whose flute and twin- (or triple-) trombone front line was modeled on a Cuban-style charanga ensemble of piano, bass, violins, flute, and percussion (replacing the violins with trombones for a heavier sound).

Palmieri developed a distinctive arranging style featuring edgy harmonies and exciting riffs and breaks for the horn section, with extended grooves for instrumental improvisation, connecting the Latin Caribbean tradition of vocal improvisation (soneo) with the improvisational excitement of jazz.

With his bandleader brother Charlie, he developed a new style that further blended traditional Latin music with Afro-Cuban influences, fusing early salsa, funk, soul and jazz on the 1971 album Harlem River Drive.

It reached an early pinnacle three years later with Sun Of Latin Music, which mixed hard salsa with R&B, rock and pop juxtaposed against jazz improvisation – and won what would be the first Grammy ever awarded for Latin music.