Eddie Palmieri Latin jazz ignites World Music Fest

 (Beth Rooney, Chicago Tribune / September 11, 2013)

Howard Reich
12:22 p.m. CDT, September 13, 2013

The 15th annual World Music Festival Chicago opened with a thunderbolt Thursday night at Millennium Park, thanks to the apparently inexhaustible energies of 76-year-old Latin jazz pianist Eddie Palmieri and his Salsa Orchestra.

Playing music that pulsed relentlessly with dance rhythms – at all tempos – Palmieri and friends seemed intent on making listeners move. In that they succeeded, the ushers at the Pritzker Pavilion trying futilely to clear the aisles of people who wanted to sway, swing, sing, scream and, of course, snap photos.

The frenzy of it all probably delighted Palmieri, who has been rousing crowds in his native New York and around the world for more than half a century. But did he realize that the proceedings were so intensely over-amplified that some in the audience were seen plugging their ears? And were the sound engineers unaware that by turning the dials so high they distorted the colors and blurred the instrumental details of Palmieri's band? One expects better at the Pritzker Pavilion, its state-of-the-art sound environment only as good as those operating the controls.


If you could tune out the sonic excess, however, there was no question that Palmieri came to conquer and left triumphant. The revelations were in how he achieved this, the accomplished pianist yielding most of the spotlight to the band at large and, thereby, emphasizing its muscular horns, hard-driving rhythm section and ferociously declamatory vocalists.

Palmieri, in other words, assigned himself essentially a supporting role rather than a starring one. That's the polar opposite of the way he played last year at Mayne Stage, fronting the Eddie Palmieri/Brian Lynch Jazz Quartet. In that intimate context, Palmieri was all over the keyboard, challenging his colleagues with tricky rhythms and stop-start solos.

Leading the large ensemble at Millennium Park, Palmieri simply set the tempos and rode them, all the while reveling in the orchestral sound swirling around him. Even in this less prominent role, however, Palmieri could not resist puckishly subverting the proceedings, taking his comparatively brief solos into keys that brazenly clashed with what everyone else was playing. The man simply cannot settle into a comfortable routine. Bravo for that.

Read more: http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct-ent-0914-eddie-palmieri-20130914,0,7652751.column