Larry Blumenfeld for The Village Voice – An uninformed listener attending a late set at the Subrosa club on a Monday in April — one who knew nothing of Eddie Palmieri’s long career shaping Afro-Latin jazz into a uniquely New York sound — might have thought the solo pianist onstage was a straight-up avant-gardist. Palmieri crafted abstractions with a heavily amplified Yamaha hybrid piano. Single notes were piercing pokes. Complex chords became brash tonal washes. The logic was rhythmic, suggested as much as stated, and always of Afro-Caribbean lineage. Palmieri’s improvisations moved from formal to funky to funny. Here and there, he gracefully stitched in a passage of startling beauty, as with the melody of “Life,” a tender ballad from his new album, Sabiduría/Wisdom.
Palmieri went on like this for more than twenty minutes, relentless and riveting. You’d never have suspected he turned eighty in December.
Born in Harlem to Puerto Rican parents, and raised in the Bronx, Palmieri is the reigning patriarch of Afro-Latin music in the U.S. On opening night of “Eddie Palmieri Presents Afro-Caribbean Mondays,” a weekly series that runs through August, some audience members seemed old enough to recall the hard-edged innovations of Conjunto la Perfecta, which Palmieri formed in 1961, or Harlem River Drive, through which, a decade later, Palmieri braided together Latin, jazz, funk and soul. Palmieri’s new album and Subrosa residency don’t amount to a victory lap. Rather, they’re evidence that he still sets the pace.