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Latin American Music Review 24.2 (2003) 210-232



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Migration and Worldview in Salsa Music

Angel G. Quintero-Rivera
(Translated by Roberto Márquez)


Everything Is Not Everything about Justice

In his All-American Music, Composition in the Late Twentieth Century, John Rockwell, former music critic of the New York Times, devotes only one of twenty chapters to a Latino—the Nuyorican Eddie Palmieri, who was the first to be awarded a "Latino" Grammy when the category was created in 1974. 1 A book that begins with a chapter on "the impact of the immigrant wave of the late 1930s and the rise of American art music" (European emigration, of course), when treating the immigrants from the Third World of the 1950s and 1960s, views Palmieri's virtuosistic innovations not as art but merely as folk "craftsmanship." The chapter on Palmieri is subtitled "Latin, Folk and the Artist as Craftsman." Rockwell continues, "One might think that innovation within a folk tradition would be prized and publicized by a progressive intelligentsia. But in folk music, the intelligentsia is often more purist than the audience" (203).

Thus, the argument goes, Palmieri had to adapt his innovations into forms acceptable to his "natural constituency," the uncultivated public of immigrant workers from the underdeveloped world. Yet despite the praise of his "chromatic, improvisatory bold piano solos and passages indebted to classical and experimental music," Palmieri is reproached for his "ambivalence about venturing beyond his ethnic nest." The predominant use of Spanish in his songs and concerts, moreover, is construed as an "insistent assurance to his salsa fans that he was not betraying the Latin tradition" (207). In a view common to Anglo commentators of the time, the Latin tradition was an impediment to the creative "potential" of this gifted "American" of Puerto Rican descent, educated in the "classical [End Page 210] music" academies of the East Coast. But might not Palmieri's attachment to "his Latino roots" have some other, more significant basis? Must his sophisticated experimentation and craftsmanship stem from external influence? Was his "niche" the product of his "ethnic community," a kind of self-imposed-ghetto—or who was ghettoizing whom? What assumptions about the relationship between music and society lay beneath that hierarchical distinction between art and craft?

Eddie Palmieri was born in New York City in 1936, before the great Puerto Rican migration of the 1950s, but his musical career was shaped precisely during the peak years of that great Latino diaspora to the Steel Babel. Between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, he animated dances in his community with a small group of musicians and at twenty-one had already been recruited to play piano in the most celebrated Latin band of the time, Tito Rodríguez's Orchestra. Seeking a venue to experiment, he left in 1961 to form his first professional band, which he called La Perfecta, in obvious reference to the meticulous quality of his "craftsmanship." Like many other musicians in the Afro-Latin Caribbean tradition, he assumed the roles of instrumentalist, bandleader, composer, producer, and arranger. In 1968 or 1969, he produced Justicia with musicians from La Perfecta, a record soon to become one of the first classics in a way of making music that was then just beginning to be called salsa.

In contrast to what was then prevalent in popular music, whether Latin or Anglo, this album is no mere compilation of songs but rather a structured whole. The record begins with one of his own compositions, the one that gives the album its title. The opening of the work reveals one of the defining characteristics of salsa ("sauce," because of its complex commingling of elements): a spontaneous combination of different musical rhythms and forms, evocative of various geographies within the Caribbean world and, above all, of different times in its complex history. It is, recall, a history marked by ruptures and constant reconstitutions; that can never be made to squeeze into the systematization of Western notions of lineal progress. This is a result of the oblique paths...

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