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In Good Hands
The shifting rhythms of Eddie Palmieri's extraordinary career.
By Ed Hazell
Berklee.edu Correspondent
April 15, 2004
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Eddie Palmieri played for students several times during his Piano Week clinic. |
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Photo by Matt Jenson |
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When pianist Eddie Palmieri leans into the keyboard with both hands, the music erupts with volcanic power. His left hand propels the music forward with a graceful, funky montuno vamp. Rolling chromatic runs in his right hand interweave around the beat, and sharp dissonant chords peck away at the underlying rhythm. The clash of left-hand vamp and right hand lines builds to a crescendo of rhythmic tension until both hands lock in a final triumphant chord. Palmieri looks up from the keyboard smiling as the audience applauds.
"For you students of the piano, that was a typical guajira," said Palmieri after the performance, which came during a Berklee clinic. "The trick is to hold that rhythmical pattern and solo independently over it. You need a division of the brain, so to speak, to keep that guajira going and solo at the same time."
Palmieri's appearance during Piano Week, hosted by faculty member Matt Jenson, was filled with great performance moments, but for students, it was also a one-of-a-kind lesson in Latin music history and keyboard technique. After nearly four decades and seven Grammy Awards, the 68-year-old Palmieri is an expert on both.
Palmieri, who received an honorary doctorate from Berklee in 1998, is as well known for popular dance hits as he is for innovative compositions and arrangements. In the mid-1960s, the Spanish Harlem native was leading his own band, La Perfecta, which popularized an aggressive two-trombone sound and logged a number of hits, including "Azucar." In the early 1970s, Palmieri released a series of innovative albums that blended jazz influences with Pan-Caribbean rhythms, creating classics such as Justicia, The Sun of Latin Music, Sentido, and Unfinished Masterpiece. These recordings established Palmieri as one of the most technically gifted pianists in Latin music as well as a bandleader with mass appeal who could also create cutting-edge music. Today, Palmieri is one of the most import living links to Latin music's heyday in the 1950s, and one of America's most original musical voices.
Palmieri began his Berklee clinic with a short history of Afro-Caribbean music. He traced its origins to the drum music of captive Africans brought to North America, the Caribbean, and Brazil, as well as to the Moorish-influenced music of the Spanish colonists. Captive Africans in North America were forbidden to play the drums, but they evolved distinctive forms such as the blues and spirituals that reflect elements of their origins and formed the basis for jazz.
After singling out the rich musical culture of Cuba as the most important for the development of modern salsa and Latin jazz, Palmieri demonstrated some Cuban rhythms such as the rhumba and its three derivatives—guaguanco, yambu, and colombia—as well as the mambo, cha cha cha, and pachanga, and said that all laid the foundation for modern Latin music. He also briefly discussed the impact of Puerto Rico's bomba and plena, and of the Brazilian samba, on contemporary salsa.
Palmieri devoted much of his lecture to giving examples of and discussing the two-handed piano technique that is central to his music. One approach he demonstrated was a common Latin piano technique of playing with both hands in octaves.
"That kind of playing is exciting," he said. "You have more density and volume to your touch, but it doesn't help with your individual fingering for soloing. It took many, many years of playing in that style to get the right hand to break away. You have to start off slowly, then put [in] the other hand. Start off with a pattern and you start getting more confidence and control. It's really the brain working in a subdivided manner. What the left hand is doing is completely different from the right."
Palmieri said that even when his music is most experimental, he never loses track of the rhythm. "You always have the focus on the clave," he said. "Whatever I'm doing will relate to it." Then he asked the audience to clap the 3-2 clave rhythm while he demonstrated how different phrases and chords he plays relate to the rhythm. "That's the drummer in me," he said. "I started out playing timbales, and I have a percussive way of approaching the piano. That's helped me throughout my career, it's very complementary to the rhythm section."
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| Palmieri met with students and faculty at a post-clinic reception. |
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| Photo by Matt Jenson |
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Going back to another history lesson, Palmieri explained that in the small conjuntos, which consisted of trumpet, piano, bass, and percussion, the piano played the role that saxophones played in big bands. "It became important at the time for the piano to play certain standard rhythmical patterns." With each new dance craze, the role of the piano in the ensemble changed, he said. "The piano took another position in the cha cha cha," he noted, and demonstrated several different cha cha cha patterns. The pianist was obligated to learn "all kinds of rhythmical patterns that are complementary to the orchestra."
Palmieri also answered questions about some of his attempts to fuse Latin music with other kinds of genres, including the Latin-funk album, Harlem River Drive; and Lucumi, Macumba, Voodoo, an elaborately orchestrated album that incorporated sacred Caribbean rhythms with salsa; and his jazz-salsa albums with vibraphonist Cal Tjader.
"I may branch out, but I've always wanted to lead a dance orchestra," Palmieri said, a statement which might seem a bit odd coming from the musician who has taken Latin music to such experimental extremes. Yet when you hear his left hand pound out a rhythm, you can't help tapping your foot or clapping along. Perhaps he's been leading dance bands all along.
Ed Hazell is a freelance jazz writer whose work appears in the Boston Phoenix, Jazziz, Berklee Today, and other magazines. He is the author of Berklee: The First 50 Years.
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