Eddie Palmieri, Pioneering Latin Jazz Musician And Grammy Winner, Dies At 88

Eddie Palmieri, the avant-garde musician who was one of the most innovative artists of rumba and Latin jazz, has died. He was 88.

Fania Records announced Palmieri’s death Wednesday evening. Palmieri’s daughter Gabriela told The New York Times that 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 and would win seven more over a career that spanned nearly 40 albums.

Palmieri was born in New York’s Spanish Harlem on December 15, 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 the playing piano. “I’m a frustrated percussionist, so I take it out on the piano,” the musician once said in his website biography.

His first Grammy win came in 1975 for the album “The Sun of Latin Music,” and he kept releasing music into his 80s, performing through the coronavirus pandemic via livestreams.

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 humor: “Learning to play the piano well. … Being a piano player is one thing. Being a pianist is another.”

Palmieri dabbled in tropical music as a pianist during the 1950s with the Eddie Forrester Orchestra. He later joined Johnny Seguí’s band and Tito Rodríguez’s before forming his own band in 1961, La Perfecta, alongside trombonist Barry Rogers and singer Ismael Quintana.

La Perfecta was the first to feature a trombone section instead of trumpets, something rarely seen in Latin music. With its unique sound, the band quickly joined the ranks of Machito, Tito Rodríguez, and other Latin orchestras of the time.

Former Associated Press Writer Sigal Ratner-Arias is the primary author of this obituary.