Music for the Millenium

They call Eddie Palmieri “the madman of Latin music,” “the Miles Davis and James Brown of the genre” and “the Latin Thelonious Monk.”

Strong language. But not as over the top as it might seem for a virtuoso pianist-composer-bandleader and five-time Grammy Award winner who has been on a personal crusade for years to bring Latin jazz to the prominent position he feels it deserves.

And he is neither fainthearted nor taciturn when he makes predictions about its future.

“Latin jazz,” the loquacious Palmieri says, “is the music that I predict will overwhelm the 21st century.

“It’s the perfect combination, the perfect hybrid between the musical structure known as jazz harmony and the most incredible rhythmical patterns--patterns that have had 40,000 years of existence on this planet.”

The visionary forecast is refreshing, if somewhat curious.

Its entertaining, cross-category blend of dancing rhythms, brilliant harmonies and soaring improvisations notwithstanding, Latin jazz has rarely managed to break through to a wide mainstream audience.

But not because of any failure of effort on Palmieri’s part. Friday night, the veteran artist brings his eight-piece band to the Veterans Wadsworth Theater for a performance in which he promises, “we’ll get the audience up on their feet. I guarantee it.”

Palmieri, 59, has been doing exactly that for a long time. This year, he celebrates his 35th anniversary as a bandleader. Despite his well-deserved reputation for blending jazz elements and Latin rhythms into an appealing, audience-accessible musical combination, he has had an oddly uneven career.

For one thing, he has not fared particularly well as a commercial recording artist.

Although Palmieri prefers to take a forward-looking view, his label associations in the past have been less than ideal. In the last 2 1/2 decades, for example, he has grazed from company to company, recording for Alegre, Tico, Coco, Columbia, Capitol, Fania and Elektra without producing major sales figures.

In that sense, as in so many other ways, Palmieri’s career symbolizes both the compelling vitality and the problematic undercurrents associated with Latin jazz.

The first difficulty, he believes, lies in the lack of support that the major labels have provided to the music.

“The only artist who was taken care of, because of the word ‘mambo,’ ” Palmieri says, “was Perez Prado at RCA in the ‘50s. And he sold a lot of albums. After that, nothing happened with the majors.”

The real problem, he believes, is that the marketing styles of the majors are not properly structured to handle Latin recordings.

“They don’t know how to work our music,” he explains. “There’s an art to working a record, to having it be well promoted. And that doesn’t exist in the majors for Latin music. They don’t know what bins to put us in, they don’t know how to work the record stores.”

Palmieri also points out that Latin jazz is rarely heard on chart-dominated commercial radio stations.

“As far as Latin jazz is concerned,” he explains, “the only place we get airplay is on the community radio stations. As soon as the main stations hear a Spanish word, that’s the end of it. And Spanish radio is completely influenced by certain record companies.”

Never one to stand idly by, the energetic Palmieri has taken a strong position in support of Latin music in general and Latin jazz in particular. In 1993, he was appointed to the Board of Governors of the New York chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, and used his position to successfully lobby for the addition of a Latin jazz category to the Grammy Awards lineup in 1995.

“It took 17 years for us to get one Grammy for all of Latin music, which is absurd,” he says. “In that period of time, Tito Rodriguez, Tito Puente and Machito could probably have won a total of six Grammys. Now we have Latin jazz, Latin pop for people like Julio Iglesias, and Mexican-American and tropical Latin. Four categories isn’t enough, but at least it’s something more positive than we ever had before.”

And Palmieri vows to continue his drive for the recognition of further aspects of Latin music.

“I’m going to keep striving for other categories,” he continues. We need Afro-Caribbean vocalist, male; we need Afro-Caribbean vocalist, female--at least. And I’ll be instrumental in making it happen before they throw me out of there. Because this music is worth every effort we make.”

The essential elements of “this music” are a product of the stewpot of African, Spanish and European ingredients that blended together in the late 19th century to become the precursors to jazz and the contemporary musics of the Caribbean.

“The heart of it,” adds Palmieri, a history buff who has traced his own ancestry back to 14th century Italy, “came from Africa, when the black man was brought into the Caribbean by the conquistadors, and when the blacks who were brought to the Spanish- and Portuguese- speaking colonies were allowed to keep their drums.”

The rhythms that evolved as the result of that chapter of history combined with European melodies and verse structures to produce an array of Caribbean music that has unfolded over three centuries.

Its presence in this country was felt gradually, via rhythms and harmonies that Jelly Roll Morton once described as “the Spanish tinge,” bubbling up in the habanera traces in Scott Joplin’s “Heliotrope Bouquet” and W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.” It is an essential element in Morton’s “New Orleans Joys,” and emerged full-blown in pieces such as the Duke Ellington Orchestra’s “Caravan” (by Juan Tizol), Woody Herman’s “Bijou,” Dizzy Gillespie’s gloriously energetic big-band collaborations with Cuban drummer Chano Pozo, and the music of dozens of other artists, from Charlie Parker and Stan Getz to Herbie Mann, Cal Tjader, Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins.

Another new blend, with a different balance between musical elements, emerged in the ‘40s and ‘50s, when immigration from the Caribbean brought a wave of dance rhythms--rumba, mambo, meringue, cha-cha-cha. And bands, based for the most part on Cuban models, began to combine jazz improvisations and harmonies with strong, danceable rhythms.

“That’s when I first came on the scene,” recalls Palmieri, who was born in Spanish Harlem on Dec. 15, 1936. His brother Charles Palmieri, a highly regarded Latin Jazz pianist and educator who died in 1988, was an early influence. But it took a while for jazz to sink in. “At first, I didn’t comprehend jazz, I just knew about Cuban music. But I soon became aware of the possibilities of Latin jazz.”

He organized a group called Conjunto La Perfecta in the early ‘60s, featuring a unique front line of flute and two trombones that lasted nearly eight years. Its unusual sound, dubbed “trombanga,” helped place it in the upper echelon of Latin jazz groups.

But the hoped-for breakthrough to a wide audience never took place, leading to the eventual disbandment of La Perfecta. Palmieri’s quest toward a blending of jazz and Latin rhythms continued, however, with a series of far-ranging albums that also encompassed salsa, rhythm & blues, avant-garde jazz elements, fusion and outright experimentalism.

Why, then, his upfront, some might say self-serving, optimism about the potential of Latin music to “overwhelm the 21st century”?

“Because there’s a momentum and a whole change in the culture,” says Palmieri, resisting any notion that he is simply pushing his own music. “Look at the players we have--Charlie Sepulveda, Hilton Ruiz, David Sanchez, David Valentin, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Danio Perez, Michel Camilo . . . so many names.”

He also believes that the new Grammy categories will have an impact, as will the large audiences he draws in his tours (including 50-plus dates annually in Europe alone).

“The record companies are going to have to sit up and take notice,” Palmieri adds, “because Latin jazz satisfies both listening and dancing pleasures, which I would say is the highest degree of satisfaction for the soul. So why shouldn’t I say it’s going to be the music of the 21st century?”

The band Palmieri brings to the Wadsworth--featuring horn players Brian Lynch, trumpet; Donald Harrison, saxophone; and Conrad Herwig, trombone, with a rhythm section bristling with bongos, congas and timbales--is the tangible evidence he offers to prove his case.

“I don’t guess I’m going to excite you with my music and my orchestra,” the ebullient Palmieri says, “I know it! Because that’s my mission on this planet.”

* Eddie Palmieri and his Orchestra at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater, Friday, May 3, 8 pm. CenterStage pre-performance discussion led by Palmieri at 7 pm. $29.50, $26.50, $11 (UCLA students with valid I.D.) (310) 825-2101.