GRAMMY Award winner Eddie Palmieri has died at the age of 88. The rumba and jazz musician died at his home in New Jersey on Wednesday. He died following an “extended illness,” his daughter, Gabriela, told The New York Times.
Music legend Palmieri, coined as the “Madman of Salsa,” was the first Latino artist to win a Grammy Award. During his illustrious career, he picked up another seven Grammy Awards.
Palmieri, from Harlem, New York, was a highly-revered pianist and first learned to play the instrument when he was a child.
He started learning at the age of eight, and his brother Charlie, was a professional pianist. Charlie, known as the Giant of the Keyboards, died in 1988.
“It was my mother who put my brother on the instrument and I came along nine years later,” Palmieri told The Savannah Morning News in 2009. “No other brothers or sisters, it was just us. I was quite blessed.” But, he was fascinated by the drums and decided to play the timbales in his uncle’s orchestra.
He then changed course and returned to playing the piano. “I’m a frustrated percussionist, so I take it out on the piano,” Palmieri said. Palmieri played alongside stars such as Johnny Segul and Tito Rodriguez before he launched La Perfecta, his own band, in 1961. He won his first Grammy Award in 1975 for his album The Sun of Latin Music. His success continued into the 1980s, scooping another two Grammy Awards.
Short Biography
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.