Eddie Palmieri, Latin Music’s Dynamic Innovator, Dies at 88

Eddie Palmieri, a pianist, composer and bandleader whose contributions to Afro-Caribbean music helped usher in the golden age of salsa in New York City, and whose far-reaching career established him as one of the great musical masterminds of the 20th century — not to mention one of its fieriest performers — died on Wednesday at his home in Hackensack, N.J. He was 88.

His youngest daughter, Gabriela Palmieri, confirmed the death, which she said came after “an extended illness.”

From the moment he founded his first steady band, the eight-piece La Perfecta, in 1961, Mr. Palmieri drove many of the stylistic shifts and creative leaps in Latin music. That group brought new levels of economy and jazz influence to a mambo scene that was just beginning to lose steam after its postwar boom, and it set the standard for what would become known as salsa. From there, he never stopped innovating.

Mr. Palmieri’s fundamental tools, he once said in an interview, were the “complex African rhythmic patterns that are centuries old” and that lie at the root of Afro-Cuban music. “The intriguing thing for me is to layer jazz phrasings and harmony on top of those patterns,” he said. Explaining where he got his knack for dense and dissonant harmonies and his gleefully contrarian sense of rhythm, he cited jazz pianists like McCoy Tyner and Thelonious Monk as inspirations.

But the art historian and critic Robert Farris Thompson, writing in 1975 about the emergence of salsa, noticed other influences as well. “He blends avant-garde rock, Debussy, John Cage and Chopin without overwhelming the basic Afro-Cuban flavor,” he wrote of Mr. Palmieri. “A new world music, it might be said, is being born.”

For his part, Mr. Palmieri was never fond of the word “salsa.” He described his music in terms of its roots: “Afro-Cuban,” he said in a 2012 interview with the Smithsonian Oral History Project. Through the participation of Puerto Ricans and Nuyoricans like himself, he explained, it had become “Afro-Caribbean. And now it’s Afro-world.”

By the end of his life Mr. Palmieri was a highly decorated statesman in both jazz and Afro-Latin music. In 2013 he was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts and a received Lifetime Achievement Award at the Latin Grammys.

Though he never graduated from high school, Mr. Palmieri was an endlessly curious and intensely intellectual man. He treated leading a band as both an art and a science, particularly after learning the Schillinger System of musical composition in the late 1960s. “What I learned intuitively — why it works, or why it excites you — now I learned it scientifically, from what I was able to capture from the Schillinger System,” he told the Smithsonian. “That has to do with rotary energy. That has to do with tension and resistance.”

One of his catchphrases was “I don’t guess I’m going to excite you with my band. I know it.”

‘Madman of Salsa’

Mr. Palmieri considered himself an ambassador of New York’s working-class and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, where he’d grown up playing stickball and dishing out egg creams at his father’s ice cream parlor. An ambassador, sure — but he could hardly be accused of acting like a diplomat: He lived by his own code, tangling often with music executives or institutions he found to be unfair or dealing in unsavory methods. That could mean confronting one of the most mobbed-up executives in American music over unpaid royalties.

“You’re getting attacked constantly, one way or the other: fights with the promoters, fighting with the record labels,” Mr. Palmieri said. “So I went through all of this.”

Mr. Palmieri later used his eminent reputation to agitate successfully for greater inclusion of Latin music at the Grammys. The winner of eight trophies himself, he served for years as a member of the Recording Academy’s New York board of governors, helping to shepherd the creation of the best Latin jazz album category in 1995.

When that category was eliminated in 2011, he wrote a letter accusing the academy of “marginalizing our music, culture and people even further.” The category was reinstated the next year.

But it wasn’t just a reputation for resistance that earned Mr. Palmieri the nickname “the Madman of Salsa.” He looked the part onstage, sometimes jagging the piano keys with elbows and forearms, lunging and crying out, broadcasting catharsis.

In cooler moments he played without moving his head or shoulders at all, holding his body threateningly still, as if stalking his prey from deep grass. He would lightly growl as he held a stubborn ostinato or chased an arpeggio into the air. Before long he would be throwing himself at the instrument again, while remaining keenly aware of the ensemble.

“Leadership is part of Eddie Palmieri’s personality; it doesn’t abate,” Ben Ratliff wrote in The New York Times in 2005, reviewing a Harlem concert. “Even motionless, he was all rigor.”

Uptown Roots

The pianist who proudly described himself as a “Puerto Rican of Italian descent, born in a New York Jewish hospital, who composes and plays Afro-Caribbean music” was born Eduardo Palmieri on Dec. 15, 1936, in New York. He was the second of two sons of Isabel Palmieri Maldonado, a seamstress, and Carlos Manuel Palmieri, a radio and television repairman. Both had immigrated from Ponce, P.R.

When Eddie was 5, his family moved to the South Bronx, where his father opened a candy store and ice cream parlor in a heavily Puerto Rican neighborhood. Young Eddie got to name it: the Mambo.

The shop became a hangout for young musicians, and while he was serving up sodas, Eddie also controlled the jukebox, playing the latest hits by Tito Puente, Tito Rodríguez and Machito, the city’s leading Latin bandleaders.

When Eddie began studying the piano at age 8, his brother Charlie, nine years his senior, was already playing it professionally. Charlie went on to study at Juilliard and joined Tito Puente’s orchestra on his way to becoming a popular bandleader himself.

In a 2009 interview with The Savannah Morning News, Eddie remembered Charlie, whom he had called his “greatest inspiration,” bringing “recordings into the house of Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, the big bands that were happening in the ’40s.”

“And then there was always the great Machito orchestra, the Afro-Cubans, which started in 1939,” he added. “So I would be listening to them at the same time my uncles were very into folkloric music upstairs, with the guitars and that.”

The brothers would collaborate frequently until Charlie’s death, of a heart attack, in 1988. In 2014, partly thanks to Eddie’s advocacy, New York City declared the corner of East 112th Street and Park Avenue, where the brothers had grown up, Charlie Palmieri Way.

In addition to his daughter Gabriela, Mr. Palmieri is survived by three other daughters, Renee, Eydie and Ileana; a son, Edward Palmieri II; and four grandchildren. His wife of 58 years, Iraida (González) Palmieri, died in 2014.

As an adolescent, Mr. Palmieri would take the subway down to Carnegie Hall for piano lessons with the concert pianist Margaret Bonds.

In his early teens, he detoured from the piano to play timbales, the rat-a-tat kettle drums prominent in Afro-Cuban music, in an uncle’s band, and the claves on some of his brother’s records. But he returned quickly to the piano, finding work in groups led by local musicians like Eddie Forrester and Johnnie Segui. At 14, he briefly led a band with the vocalist Joe Quijano.

Mr. Palmieri joined the Cuban singer Vicentico Valdés’s ensemble in 1956, the same year he married Iraida González, who would be by his side for the next 58 years. He spent the first two years of their marriage in Tito Rodríguez’s orchestra, a mainstay at the Palladium Ballroom, the heart of New York’s mambo scene.

La Perfecta

Taking a leap of faith, Mr. Palmieri left Mr. Rodríguez in 1960 to put together his own ensemble. The next year, struggling to build a following, he borrowed $1,000 from his mother-in-law and rented out the Tritons, a small but popular club in the Bronx, for a month.

He booked himself into the club multiple nights a week, performing his compositions in different small-band configurations. He was partial to the classic Cuban conjunto format, with a four-trumpet front line, but top-flight trumpeters were expensive, so he sought other options. He came to rely on Barry Rogers, an inventive trombonist he had met at the club, who mixed doses of jazz into full-blooded playing.

“It became an economic situation: the trombone or the flute,” Mr. Palmieri told the Smithsonian. “Then one night I was able to have them both, and I said, ‘That’s it.’” He had found his “perfect” formula: Mr. Rogers’s trombone; the wood flute of George Castro; a small rhythm section, featuring veterans of Mr. Rodríguez’s band; and the vocalist Ismael Quintana. He called the band La Perfecta.

Invited by the producer Al Santiago to record for his influential Alegre label, Mr. Palmieri convened a series of recording sessions: one with a typical Afro-Cuban conjunto-style band featuring four trumpets; another with trumpets and trombones; and another with just trombone and flute on the front line. Somehow, the album still felt cohesive, and a core identity shone through on all 12 short, catchy tracks. It was in the wily, deceptively lush arrangements he had written with Mr. Rogers; the driving polyrhythms of a small, efficient rhythm section; and Mr. Palmieri’s multilayered, spitfire piano playing.

The album, “Conjunto La Perfecta,” became the talk of New York City north of 96th Street, and then a landmark in Latin music, perhaps the closest thing there was to an opening bell for the salsa movement.

La Perfecta released a second album in 1963: “El Molestoso,” whose title translates loosely as “the nuisance.” Mr. Palmieri proved a crafty nuisance that year when the Palladium’s management was refusing to hire La Perfecta. He booked himself gigs at a dance hall across the street and stood outside before shows, daring concertgoers on their way to hear Tito Puente or Tito Rodríguez to come check out La Perfecta instead: “Not there, folks! Over here, folks!”

He wore down the ballroom’s management, and La Perfecta was booked for an extended run at the Palladium. The band played until the ballroom’s closing night in 1966.

The dancers at the ballroom were known to be as formidable as the bands, and Mr. Palmieri came to see the couples that swung about the floor as “the enemy” in a war of attrition. “Who’s going to knock who out?” he said in a 2012 interview, remembering his approach. “When I come and play ‘Azúcar,’ the word would spread: If you intend to dance this composition, wait till after the piano solo because you’ll never make it!”

“Azúcar,” an energetic descarga, or extended jam, that often churned along for close to 20 minutes, became La Perfecta’s signature piece. “It was already a hit in the street,” Mr. Palmieri told the Smithsonian, by the time La Perfecta put the energy of the Palladium’s dancers onto wax.

The track was released on the LP “Azúcar Pa’ Ti” in 1965, the same year as Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”; both played a part in challenging the time constraints of commercial radio. Clocking in at eight and a half minutes, “Azúcar” became a hit, and listeners called in to complain if disc jockeys didn’t play the whole thing.

In 2009, the track was added to the National Recording Registry as a landmark of American culture.

While leading La Perfecta, Mr. Palmieri also forged a partnership with the West Coast jazz vibraphonist Cal Tjader; they released two well-received LPs together, “El Sonido Nuevo” (1966) and “Bamboléate” (1967). Those albums foreshadowed Mr. Palmieri’s forays into full-on Latin jazz, which he explored more heavily in the 1990s and 2000s.

Demanding His Due

In the mid-1960s, Mr. Palmieri was recording for Tico Records, run by the infamous executive Morris Levy. (Mr. Levy’s strong-arm techniques may have had something to do with D.J.s’ willingness to play all of “Azúcar” in the first place: “Whoever he had his hands on, they had no choice but to play it, whether they liked it or not,” Palmieri said in an interview with the National Endowment for the Arts’ “Art Works” podcast.)

Mr. Levy was already under investigation by the F.B.I. when Mr. Palmieri, frustrated by Tico’s exploitative business practices, threatened to have his employer’s books audited.

He made himself such a molestoso that Mr. Levy — who was later convicted of conspiring with the Mafia — turned over Mr. Palmieri’s contract to Coco Records, a small new label. Mr. Palmieri’s relationship with Coco turned sour, too, after he said the label had refused to adequately support his vision for the LP that would become “Unfinished Masterpiece.” Coco released the LP anyway; it won Mr. Palmieri a Grammy, but he still went to war with the label, refusing to record for it for three years.

Mr. Palmieri, who took classes part time at the alternative-minded Henry George School of Social Science, was among the first major salsa artists to put strong political messages in music. In 1969, soon after disbanding La Perfecta, he released “Justicia,” one of his most lasting and ambitious albums, with the vocalists Ismael Quintana and Justo Betancourt delivering melodic chants over a large ensemble’s hard-charging salsa arrangements, flights of avant-garde improvising and “West Side Story” balladry.

Recorded for Mr. Levy’s label in an unheated studio in the dead of winter, “Justicia” signaled both a new level of social engagement for Mr. Palmieri and the start of a fruitful experimental period. Over the next decade he released bold albums including “Superimposition” (1970), “Vamonos Pa’l Monte” (1971), “The Sun of Latin Music” (1974) — which won the first Grammy for best Latin recording — and “Lucumí, Macumba, Voodoo” (1978).

In those years, “what defined the parameters of both the music and the Latin New York identity that was emerging were the ‘Barretto-Palmieri Wars,’” the Village Voice journalist Pablo Guzmán later wrote, referring to the rivalry between Mr. Palmieri and the conga drummer and bandleader Ray Barretto.

Mr. Barretto was the figurehead for Fania, the top salsa label, and its famed Fania All-Stars; Mr. Palmieri was the uncontainable “madman” who never stuck with any label, or single style, for very long.

So-called salsa dura (“hard salsa”) had become the nearest thing Manhattan’s uptown streets had to a soundtrack, stirring elements of rock, jazz and R&B into the soffrito of Afro-Cuban son and mambo. Mr. Palmieri’s LPs in particular provided the musical backdrop for an era of radical politics in the barrio, and he became directly involved in movements for Puerto Rican statehood and social justice in New York.

‘Uncle Sam Lost’

His work sometimes drew unwanted attention from the authorities. In the early 1970s, Mr. Palmieri and his brother started Harlem River Drive, a fusion project uniting soul, funk and jazz musicians with salsa players, with lyrics of social discontent sung in English. The group recorded a debut album, titled simply “Harlem River Drive,” that is now considered a classic, followed by a live album at Sing Sing prison. When federal agents found copies of those records at the hide-out of the radical group the Weather Underground, Morris Levy got a visit from the authorities — and not for the first time. “Mr. Levy calls me in. ‘Mr. Palmieri, what did you record for me this time?’” he remembered.

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, Mr. Palmieri was on the run from I.R.S. agents, and tax collectors even showed up at his gigs, sometimes forcing him to flee in the middle of a performance. When they finally caught him, he was led off the stage in handcuffs, leaving his band to finish the performance without him. Brought before a judge, Mr. Palmieri said: “The half a million dollars you’re looking for, your honor, went to my children’s education. And Uncle Sam? Uncle Sam lost.”

He eventually worked out a deal with the I.R.S., but the 1980s — most of which he spent living in Puerto Rico — were economically dire years for him. It wasn’t until 1992 that his son, by then working as his manager, dug up Mr. Palmieri’s old contracts and asserted his father’s right to royalties he had been denied. In all, Eddie Palmieri II said he had helped recover the rights to about 140 songs that his father had written, leading to a windfall of hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. The younger Mr. Palmieri has estimated that his father’s uncollected royalties from before 1992 might have exceeded $5 million.

The 1994 LP “Palmas” was Mr. Palmieri’s first to feature a frontline of all tried-and-true jazz musicians, including the trumpeter Brian Lynch and the saxophonist Donald Harrison, backed by an Afro-Latin rhythm section. The album was widely celebrated and marked a regeneration for Mr. Palmieri’s career. He won back-to-back Grammys in the best Latin jazz album category for “Listen Here!” (2005) and “Simpático” (2006), the latter released in collaboration with Mr. Lynch.

Mr. Palmieri and Mr. Puente shared the Grammy for best salsa album in 2001, for their collaboration “Masterpiece/Obra Maestra.”

Mr. Palmieri never stopped performing and recording. In his last decades he split his efforts between a Latin jazz octet; La Perfecta II, a revival of his original band; and the full-size Salsa Orchestra, featuring the vocalist Hermán Olivera. With his spongelike memory and curious, critical mind, he also never stopped seeking out knowledge of the roots and shoots of his music.

As he told the Smithsonian in 2012, “I try constantly to get even more information,” and to pass it on to the public. “Whenever I am able to relate, I do, because it’s so important, our genre. I love it so much. It put the world to dance.”

Alexandra E. Petri contributed reporting.