| Carina del Valle Schorske
New Yorker contributor  Photograph by David Dee Delgado for The New Yorker Recently I’ve been joking with friends that soon I might have to rewrite Esmeralda Santiago’s famous book “When I Was Puerto Rican” with a new title: “When I Was Nuyorican.” Florida’s Puerto Rican population has surpassed New York’s, and these days our city’s bodegas are more likely to blast Mexican ranchera or Dominican dembow instead of salsa. But some giants of the genre are still here: Eddie Palmieri, at the age of eighty-seven, remains a vital pianist and bandleader. Writing this profile has been a way to honor the profound influence that Nuyoricans have had on global culture, and on my own development as an artist and critic. Whatever I’ve managed to learn about originality and tradition, call and response, allusion and revision, I’ve absorbed through salsa gorda, especially Palmieri’s extended improvisations. I often play his arrangement of “Pa’ Huele” for friends and lovers as an introduction to Latin music—evidence that something complex might also seduce, snaking in through the pelvis, up the spine, and into the cerebral cortex where it takes on the syntax of philosophy. Palmieri, a student of Aristotle, Joseph Schillinger, and the music theorist Otto Ortmann, told me that, if you practice rigorously, you can let go of conscious technique in the moment of performance. “The brain drops it like a hot potato,” he said. Every great artist knows there’s a delicate balance between control and surrender. But, even when Palmieri falls silent at the piano, the sound of his bandmates is, in some sense, the sound of his listening. Reporting this story has brightened my Nuyorican melancholia. The weekend before Pride, I met up with my friend Tania to see the queer salsa band Las Mariquitas at a block party in Bushwick. They had refigured an old Puerto Rican plena and dedicated the new version to the people of Palestine. Mobéy Lola Irizarry’s opening vamp had all the microtonal richness of the Muslim call to prayer—a timely allusion, but also an organic invocation of the Moorish and Romani migrations that still reverberate inside the music of the Spanish Caribbean. “Si me amo te amo,” they chanted, “If I love myself, I love you.” I thought of the way Palmieri had mobilized very old African rhythms to demand liberation for Black and Puerto Rican people as the social movements of the nineteen-sixties gained traction. Later, Irizarry told me that Palmieri is “a core influence” for Las Mariquitas. The symmetry suddenly seemed as obvious as the universal thirst for freedom: “La libertad, lógico.” Listen to the author’s playlist of her favorite Eddie Palmieri tunes » | 
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