Eddie Palmieri

So he goes back a ways. (He might even have been a source for Cheo Feliciano's style.)

1. Unfinished Masterpiece
2. Azucar Pa' Ti (early material with La Perfecta)
3. Palo Pa' Rumba (which includes a lot of covers of his earlier material, but all well done)

Unfortunately, all of these, except the third, suffer from very poor audio quality.

(Hey FW, you should post comments about Palmieri to this thread.)

Sat., May 6, Allison Miner Music Heritage/Lagniappe Stage, 4 p.m. (interview w/ Palmieri); BellSouth/WWOZ Jazz Tent, 5:45 p.m. performance

Then he's touring the US again (I think). I know he's doing a bunch of nights in June at tiny Georgetown DC club Blues Alley

I think he's fun to watch live even if you don't like his noisy jazzy side. He is just quite a character...

How is he a character? Those groaning noises?

I am surprised that gareth picked him, but I guess I shouldn't be!

I will send some helpful links as well.

There are some fantastic passages and moments on this album, perhaps as intense as anything else in his catalog. I think it tends to be a bit overlooked because it's so oddball (for salsa, anyway): the Palmieri album with the most overt references to African-based religions also has the most overt disco moments, along with the occasional sudden appearance of European classical instruments seldom heard in Latin music.

Hm, is The sun Of Latin Music an entirely different album from El Sol... , then?

http://ec2.images-amazon.com/images/P/B00005RYD2.01._AA240_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

(That's not exactly what the reissue will look like, but presumably close.)

Eddie Palmieri's Lucumi Macumba Voodoo is linked to here:

http://revolucionno.wordpress.com/

A must-hear album if you are interested in 70s Palmieri (and maybe if you are interested in weird late 70s Latin/disco fusions, not that that describes more than two or three tracks). I think I already gave my reasons above, and possibly on some other threads.

HARLEM RIVER DRIVE

HARLEM RIVER DRIVE

HEY !

-- Ellis From Die Hard, Saturday, June 18, 2005 11:33 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark Link

this

Go download Lucumi Macumba Voodoo!

i will! when i'm not at work

Revive just to say that Ellis is OTM and a half--that Harlem River Drive stuff is deathless. "Idle Hands" is my favorite song of all time, this week.

Revive just to say I am listening once again to Azucar Pa' Ti, and the original La Perfecta albums have gradually become my favorite part of EP's output, though initially I didn't like them much.

Barry Rogers, man.

Eddie Palmieri is playing this weekend (in Philadelphia) and I don't have tickets yet

Just saw him live again (this time at the Kennedy Center) and once again when someone yelled for something old with a clave beat he said he didn't have a singer, so he couldn't. It's pretty clear he doesn't really like playing with a singer anymore and is more comfortable with his current Latin jazz approach. ALthough he did let his timbales, bongos, and conga player get rhythmic at times with he accompanying them in a more straightforward manner. He's charismatic enough and such a good player that I genreally enjoy him live no matter what (although this 1 hour 15 minute gig that was being recorded for NPR could have used an encore and less of his explaining the history of salsa according to him)

Maybe he can make more money this way than he would having to pay a vocalist. Maybe he's spoiled from working with excellent vocalists over the years and is not interested in grooming a new young vocalist.

I don't think its a money thing; I think its a music style thing--he doesn't want to have a vocalist standing around doing nothing when he decides to do noisy forearms on the keys solos

Maybe. Maybe, but on plenty of his 70s/early 80s salsa recordings (with vocalist) he goes into dissonant solo passages, but maybe not as extended as he likes to do? I don't know. I think I only saw him perform one time, back in 1998 (or 99?), and I was practically brand new to Latin music at that point. Mostly he was promoting El Rumbero Del Piano.

I still suspect vocalists would take a bigger slice of profits than other band members, at least if they are vocalists with an established reputation.

This Chris Washburne book has me thinking of salsa in very economic terms. The more I think about both the social and economic context of salsa in the past, the less optimistic I am about a large-scale recovery of the genre. Not that I was optimistic anyway. As great a genre as it is, I don't see how the stars will ever align in the right way to bring about a revival.

Well, what happened to Hernan Olivera? I have seen him sing with Eddie before and once I saw him with Chris Washburne who had invited him to the gig after a few shows with Eddie- Chris plays the La Perfecta gigs when either Conrad or Jimmy, your favorite, can't make it.

Yeah, I have quite a few musicians complaining about the drying up of the lucrative Latin gigs.

I don't know, but Olivera is no longer so new and he's got a pretty solid reputation, so again I wonder if someone like that wants more money than he's worth to a bandleader like EP who can just go instrumental. Then again, what has Olivera been doing lately? I'm not in New York, but recording-wise I don't think there's been that much. Could be wrong because whatever it is would probably just be some uninspired cover/tribute project.

I think Herman still sings with him, I just think he doesn't have a vocalist every show.

He hasn't had a vocalist with him at a Washington D.C. show in forever. I don't think I ever remember seeing him with a singer here, and I've seen him here countless times over the years. We just get the Palmieri Latin-jazz presentation.

But I see that Olivera sang with Eddie out in Hollywood last year

http://irom.wordpress.com/2012/08/17/live-latin-jazz-the-eddie-palmieri-salsa-orchestra-and-ruben-blades-at-the-hollywood-bowl/

I checked with some DC folks in the know and they said that way back in the '70s Eddie used to have no-name singers with him regularly in DC; but more recently just twice over the last decade; with the last time being around 5 or so years ago.

Actually that reminds me that I recently came across this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEh1BGsqW3g&feature=youtube_gdata_player
One of the comments said the bass player looks like Oscar Stagnaro but I have since asked two people who would know who it was and they both immediately said: " Is it Oscar? No, that's not Oscar." I'm working up the nerve to ask his son if his dad has a doppelgänger.

So I was reading a reference to Palmieri's Unfinished Masterpiece (1974) where he allegedly(I haven't heard it) started out trying to add more African rhythms to his salsa and jazz but he gave up on the effort; and then his label, band and producer decided to add more and "finish" it. But I see on Amazon that the album is out of print, and my quick look on Spotify did not find it either.

I was reading a reference to it in the Will Hermes book on '70s NY music, but I see it was discussed way upthread here also.

I bet the whole thing is up on youtube, and you might as well listen to it that way considering how lo-fi the sound of the CD is. Here's "Cobarde":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeCR0es4Je8

Of course. will do

Found only one other song from the album so far, but need to look more. Wow, that one u posted is noisy and polyrhythmic.

It's not actually all that different, just maybe an extreme point in the 70s Palmieri sound. Also, as I said above, I hear Lucumi Macumba Voodoo as being pretty close. Not as raw, but also much better recorded.

I was just thinking lately about this funny post about that album:

Lucumi, Macumba Voodoo. Definitely one of his weirdest. To this day I never understood why? Why out of tune Cello's after that Brazilian rythm that starts off that weird modal piano solo, only to go into the son MI CONGO? Other than the heart of thsi song and Colombia Te Canto, I don't know what he was thinking with those other three tunes....

rec.music.afro-latin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5z4gIg9wlQ

I still say rec.music.afro-latin was the best online discussion of Afro-Latin music I ever came across (as someone who only reads English, of course). It technically still exists but it's been essentially dead for many years. (Appropriate? Haha.) It was an education, and I assume I'll never be on the same level as most of the people who used to post to it. Also, for me personally, the timing was really good. I took my first salsa dance class in very late 1997. I started fooling around with newsgroups at around the same time, probably closer to 1998. (I was somewhat of a late adapter I guess.) The rise of the web happened to coincide with my entree into the world of Latin music and dance, and I think it helped speed up my learning curve (especially w/r/t the music).

I missed out on that.

Unrelated-

Fania/Codigo keeps renaming a 2 cd Eddie Palmieri compilation. First they confusingly named it "The Sun of Latin Music" which is the name of an actual earlier Palmieri album, then they renamed it "A Man & his Music" and now its called "El Virtuoso"

Lol. Trying to be (Japanese band) Boris. Maybe they should call it Heavy Rocks.

I have that comp. A Man & His Music is the name of the whole series (the Celia Cruz & La Lupe ones are called A Woman & Her Music, the Sonora Ponceña and Fania All-Stars ones are called A Band & Their Music, obviously), and each one has an individual title as well. The Sun of Latin Music is (or was) the official title, and I guess now they've re-named it El Virtuoso.

I bought the cd as a gift and it showed up as "El Virtuoso" although Amazon does not list it by that title (the songs and photo matches us with the older titles)

A trombonist friend got me into Barry Rogers, so I'm going back to Mozambique, Molasses, some of the other early records. Had no idea a Polish Jew was one of Willie Colon's primary inspirations, and he's a beast, you love to see it. The records sound incredible too.

Barry Rogers is the coolest.

I've seen his son play a few times

There was a great profile of Barry Rogers on Descarga, maybe it can still be found on the Internet Archive.

Random details I seemed to recall: he was good at fixing cars and he really liked being in the coro, just being one of the guys and singing backing vocals and sounding like some old dude who had just come down from the mountains in the jungle on one of the islands.

Here's something about him:
https://latinomusiccafe.com/2017/05/22/barry-rogers-remembering-his-legacy-to-latin-music/

Lots of broken links until I found one that worked!
https://web.archive.org/web/20150525231313/http://www.descarga.com/cgi-bin/db/archives/Profile42

^Really one of my favorite pieces of music writing ever.

His son Chris Rogers did some public facebook posts I see about his Dad

Yeah. He plays trumpet himself.

First time I saw him play was with the Diane Moser Big Band in the John Birks Gillespie Auditorium at the Baha'i Center in the West Village. Mike Longo was out front handing the tickets and telling bad jokes as he always did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3iQTFwKdCY

Thanks, that's an incredible article, I passed it on to my friend (who's a Rogers devotee and an incredible trombonist himself).

:)

There's also really long live version of "Muñeca" from the early seventies which I haven't listened to yet and it doesn’t say whether Barry is playing on it.

So I will just listen to the studio version on repeat for now.

Thanks for that descarga website bio of Barry Rogers . Wow . Love those details

You don't recall reading it when I posted it before? Guess it's been a while.

Heh, Luques Curtis just started following me on Instagram.

I never post anything there. It's really just another case of a musician following back their fans. Or sometimes even following forward.

Listening some awesome Barry Rogers playing on the radio, couldn't tell you what right now though

This: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pXWFRrm91M