Eddie Palmieri’s 13 Essential Songs and Albums

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A Nuyorican original, the pianist and bandleader Eddie Palmieri began his career playing in mambo orchestras at the tail end of the Palladium era — named for the Manhattan club on West 52nd Street where crowds flocked to dance to mambo orchestras with robust horn and percussion sections — using his eclectic training on piano to drive dancers to ecstatic heights. Cutting his teeth with bandleaders like Johnny Segui and the mambo king Tito Rodríguez, Palmieri formed his own band, La Perfecta, in the early 1960s. The style he pioneered in those days would be central to the evolution of a music that what would eventually be called salsa.

Ironically, Palmieri, who died on Wednesday at 88, like other bandleaders of his era, disliked the term, castigating it as a catchall that obscured foundational Afro-Cuban dance rhythms like son, guaracha, guaguancó, danzón and cha cha cha. Yet La Perfecta had a new twist that helped distinguish the New York style from Cuban music: a two-trombone gut punch provided by the Bronx-born Barry Rogers and the Brazilian-born José Rodrigues.