Eddie Palmieri, the genius and prophet of Afro-Caribbean jazz, showed Herbie Hancock, maybe Wynton Marsalis and certainly the roaring audience at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall a thing or three last weekend. His band La Perfecta II, reconstituting the instrumentation and compositions for mambo, cha-cha and pachanga dancing Palmieri introduced in 1961, blew the lid off the joint as I’ve heard no other band do since it opened in 2004, establishing Latin music’s clavé rhythm for all time at the core of what Marsalis likes to call “the house that swing built.”Â
Swing they did, La Perfecta, swing hard, with style, precision and vengeance much more driving, cool and fiery than anything else taken for swing today. If only the Rose Hall seats could have been pushed aside for dancing. Swing, swivel, dip, cut, twist, step, shift, glide, gesture — faster, faster, faster — in perfect syncopation with the polyrhythmic percussion, the riffing trombones and trumpet, the steely-plucked trés and full-bodied but sparely applied flute.
Palmieri at the piano – age 73, dapper in suit and yellow tie, busy cueing his horns, supporting his elegant yet impassioned male singers, goosing the tempo kept by his deft young bassist and veteran conga player, breaking into unpredictably funky or classical, flowing or staggered keyboard solos — is probably the last surviving bandleader in America today who makes “swing” transcend its historic import to render big band virtuosity, intensity and density at highest speeds more immediate than tomorrow’s pop. His music isn’t  contemporary, it’s immediate, and thus timeless.
He expands on an extraordinary American idiom — check out this clip from a Fania All-Stars session of Palmieri, the “Sun of Latin Music” with fellow keyboardists Larry Harlow and Papo Lucca, Johnny Pacheco playing flute and Ismael Quintana singing lead:Â
