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Nebraska Beef

from Fotki Yandex

Eddie Palmieri Interview

Interview with Eddie Palmieri and Brian Lynch at Jazz.com:

I’m always curious about people’s initial exposure to music. In your case, Eddie, I suspect that your family was involved.

EP: It started with my mother, who arrived from Puerto Rico in 1945. When my brother Charlie was born, he was almost immediately put into the study of piano, and by the time he was 14, he was playing professionally. He was nine years older than me, and was clearly my inspiration. So I started hearing the music he was playing and the records he would bring home, as well as the bands he played with the other popular big bands.

At the same time, my uncles were very musical. The extended family lived very close together, so I always heard them playing guitars and singing. Between them upstairs at my grandmother’s, and my brother in our home, little by little I was inspired to study piano. I studied drums briefly, because my uncle had a typical orchestra like the kind you found in Puerto Rico, and I played timbales with him. After doing that for two years, I gave him the timbales back and returned to the piano.

Your brother Charlie is someone who deserves more attention from music fans.

EP: In my opinion, he was the greatest pianist in our genre. At that time, the kind of club dates you saw later didn’t exist; but by 1948 he was already working at the Copacabana, in the orchestra. He also helped Tito Puente get started around that time by doing the Picadilly Boys. He made some great recordings with Tito, then left to join Pupi Campo, who was working with Jack Paar on a TV show. This was when Paar had a show early in the morning. Having gone through the big bands and the show bands, Charlie finally decided to start traveling with a smaller group, four or five musicians. When he’d get a gig on the road, he’d recommend me as his sub for the New York work he had.

By 1959, he formed his first charanga band, with a young man named Johnny Pacheco on flute. That’s when my brother started to write, not just for his groups but also for many other artists through Tito Puente’s office.

So you came on the scene as Charlie’s little brother.

EP: Right. He’d tell people, “My brother’s just starting, but he’s ready.” That’s how I got my first gig, with a bass player named Johnny Segui, who had a great book because he was also a copyist. He’d do the copying for Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez, and the deal was that he’d get a copy of the arrangement for himself. So he had a great book. Then my brother recommended me to Vincentico Valdez, who had been the vocalist with Tito Puente for many years. I spent two years with him, beginning in 1956, and then he recommended me to Tito Rodriguez, who had started to do a Vegas-type show. We even went to Vegas. I recorded that great album Live at the Palladium with him. It included Latin Jazz, which wasn’t called Latin Jazz at the time, but the jazz element was already mixed in with the more dance-oriented pieces. By late 1961, I started my first orchestra, La Perfecta.

Eddie & Charlie Palmieri in Concert

Zelaya's steps. . .

From the Guardian:

Ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya stepped across the border into his homeland today, vowing to reclaim his post a month after soldiers flew him into exile.

Zelaya's supporters clashed with soldiers and police after the government ordered everyone off the streets along the 600-mile border with Nicaragua in a noon-to-dawn curfew.

Wearing his trademark white cowboy hat, Zelaya walked up to a sign reading Welcome to Honduras and smiled to cheering supporters at the remote mountain pass surrounded by banana trees. He stopped a few steps into Honduran territory, however, saying he was negotiating with military officials to let him be reunited with his family in Honduras.

"I've spoken to the colonel and he told me I could not cross the border," Zelaya said. "I told him I could cross." Zelaya said he was trying to get in touch with more senior military commanders.

US secretary of state Hillary Clinton called Zelaya's trip "reckless".

International leaders have urged Zelaya not to return to Honduras out of fear it would lead to bloodshed, but Zelaya said he had no choice after US-backed talks with the coup-installed government failed to reinstate him. That government has insisted it will arrest Zelaya once he returns, ignoring threats of sanctions from nations worldwide if he is not reinstated.

Soldiers formed a human chain near the border crossing but made no immediate move to approach Zelaya as he stood speaking on a mobile phone.

In a statement, the interim government said it still believed in negotiations. Its deputy foreign minister, Marta Alvarado, accused Zelaya of seeking "subversion and a bloodbath".

Zelaya said his reinstatement is necessary to preserve democracy and prevent coups, not only in Honduras but across a region that has seen many in its turbulent political history.

"The people of Latin America and the world have been losing their rights," Zelaya said before crossing.

He appealed to soldiers to lower their weapons when they see him, and asked the interim government of Roberto Micheletti to allow him back.

"Let me return in peace. Let calm return to Honduras," he said.

Thousands of Zelaya's supporters flocked to the border to support his return. The government responded by ordering everyone along the border off the streets from noon until dawn. But many ignored the order, and Zelaya supporters clashed with security forces that fired tear gas at the crowd. Police reported one demonstrator was slightly injured.

In Honduras. . .

From Counterpunch:

Gabriel Garcia Màrquez could easily have written "A Hundred Years of Solitude" in any country of Central America. It's a region replete with characters and magical landscapes and myths with power to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck when you merely hear them. There's the one about the gringo who visited the mining region of Cabañas and soon thereafter the water turned bad and the fish in the river died and the people all began to die simply because a mysterious gringo passed through.

That's the story as Miguel Rivera tells it. His brother, Marcelo Rivera was the latest victim of the newly organized death squads, formed from what appears to be a triad of power: Pacific Rim (a Canadian multinational), the ARENA party (the political party organized by the death squad killer of Monsignor Romero, Roberto D'Aubuisson) and the "maras" or gang members.

Of course Miguel, who has a deep and even scientific knowledge of his locale, is aware that the myth is just that: a small story that reveals a larger, hidden truth, in this case that a "Gringo" multinational indeed entered the area, but the reason for the deaths was the heavy metal waste from the mining that was poured into the community's water.

In cultures and states where telling the exact truth can lead to one's death, it's always more convenient to wrap the story in myth. Those who unpackage the myths, like Marcelo Rivera, often disappear into thin air -- that is, until they're found, as he was, naked, castrated and murdered after being horribly tortured: his fingernails had all been pulled out; his face had been disfigured so much that his brother could only identify him by his nose; the beatings had broken his skull. Finally, after he had been strangled to death, his body was thrown in a sixty-foot well, covered with chicken manure, dirt, and pieces of meat.

The right wing press did, of course, repeat the official story that Marcelo had fallen in with "mara" gangsters and drank with them, but editors had the integrity to also print a counterpoint that everyone who knew Marcelo had quite clear: that the victim of the unholy triad of moneyed power in El Salvador never drank nor hung out with the maras. His hero was Monsignor Romero and Miguel says the last time he saw his brother he was wearing a t-shirt with the image of that martyr on it.

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