The pianist, composer and bandleader was the first Latino to win a Grammy and would win seven more over a career that spanned nearly 40 albums
The pianist, composer and bandleader was the first Latino to win a Grammy and would win seven more over a career that spanned nearly 40 albums
Eddie Palmieri, the avant-garde musician who was one of the most innovative artists of rumba and Latin jazz, has died aged 88.
Fania Records announced Palmieri’s death Wednesday evening. Palmieri’s daughter Gabriela told the New York Times her father died earlier that day at his home in New Jersey after “an extended illness”.
The pianist, composer and bandleader 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.
Palmieri was born in New York’s Spanish Harlem in 1936, at a time when music was seen as a way out of the ghetto. He began studying the piano at an early age, like his famous brother Charlie Palmieri, but at age 13, he began playing timbales in his uncle’s orchestra, overcome with a desire for the drums.
He eventually abandoned the instrument and went back to playing piano. “I’m a frustrated percussionist, so I take it out on the piano,” the musician once said in his website biography.
In a 2011 interview with the Associated Press, when asked if he had anything important left to do, he responded with his usual humility and good humour: “Learning to play the piano well .
