Latin-jazz icon Eddie Palmieri, back with two new albums, a tour, and interactive ‘Salsa Jams’ app

“Music means more to me now than ever,” said Latin-jazz master Eddie Palmieri, who in his early days was known as Pancho Rompetecla (“Pancho The Key Breaker”) because of his explosive piano style.

Now embarked on a fall tour, the eight-time Grammy winner and his six-man band perform Saturday at Copley Symphony Hall as part of the San Diego Symphony’s Jazz at the Jacobs series.

On Dec. 7, he will release the big band-driven “Mi Luz Mayor” (“My Oldest Light”), which features an array of guest artists, including Carlos Santana. It’s Palmieri’s second album of 2018 and the first on his own Uprising Music label, which is distributed by the indie label Ropeadope Records..

“Mayor” follows “Full Circle” — his 45th album, by most counts — and last year’s Afro-Caribbean-meets-New-Orleans gem, “Sabiduría” (“Wisdom”) — his first release since 2005. Factor in his groundbreaking new Palmieri Salsa Jams app and it’s clear this reinvigorated music maverick is back, with a vengeance.

“Well, not with a vengeance. It’s more that I came back because it seems they can’t do without me!” Palmieri said playfully by phone from his New York home.

“And I’m still alive and still loving what I do. Let me put it this way. If you don’t love what you’re doing, you have no business doing it. And there is nothing more important to me than the students who come behind me. Who will they listen to?”

Who? And how?

Palmieri Salsa Jams is billed as “the world’s first interactive salsa music app.”

Available through noted jazz trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah’s Stretch Music App platform, Salsa Jams enables students to read sheet music or play along by ear for every song on Palmieri’s “Full Circle” album. They can also mute or fade out altogether any instrument, so that they can play that instrumental part, as well as control the tempo, loop rhythms and melodies, and more.

‘I put salsa on my spaghetti, baby!’

“If students mean anything to you, you want to set them on the right track,” said Palmieri, who — at 81 — is likely the most senior Latin music legend to release an app of any kind, let alone a salsa app.

Never mind that this bearded composer and band leader snorts with derision at the mere mention of the word salsa, which came to the fore in New York in the 1960s. He regards the commercial tag placed on this Cuban-inspired Latin dance music hybrid as simplistic and misleading.

“Fania Records came up with name ‘salsa’ and it’s a complete misnomer,” charged Palmieri, who in 1962 released his debut solo album, “La Perfecta,” on Fania and was later featured on the first Fania All-Stars album.

“Like my great friend, Tito Puente, used to say: ‘I put salsa on my spaghetti, baby!’ It (salsa) comes from rumba, guaracha, danzón, cha-cha, mambo, guaguancó, changüí. They all have their proper names, but we lump it under one name: ‘salsa’.”

By any name — and with, or without, any apps — Palmieri has been galvanizing audiences for more than 60 years. he will turn 82 on Dec. 15.

Like no one before or since, this Spanish Harlem-born son of Puerto Rican parents revolutionized Latin music. He changed its traditional instrumentation and fused classical dissonance, jazz improvisation and extended harmonies together with a panoply of Afro-Cuban rhythms. Palmieri also drew from soul and funk, and helped lay the foundation for several strains of what later became known as World Music.

For good measure, in the 1960s and 1970s, he made such politically charged works as “Mozambique,” “Harlem River Drive” (which was recorded live at Sing Sing prison and which he will revive and update next year) and “Revolt/La Libertad Logico” (“Revolt/Freedom Logically”). Palmieri’s stylistic diversity led to him sharing concert stages with everyone from Bob Marley and Bob Dylan to Gil Scott-Heron and the Grateful Dead.

“When I was starting out, I spent time analyzing all the Latin music orchestras who made 78 RPM records,” he recalled. “At that time, they had to record each song at (no more than) two minutes and 45 seconds. How could they create all that excitement in that short time? It was through tension and release, just like sex, and putting it in a rhythmic structure. It took me years to learn how to do that.”

‘Nobody alive compares with Eddie’

A 2013 NEA Jazz Master recipient, Palmieri was rivaled only by late jazz giants Miles Davis and Art Blakey in discovering and nurturing vital young artists.

Over the years, his bands have featured such notable musicians as saxophonist Donald Harrison, bassist Andy Gonzalez, and trombonist Conrad Herwig. That list also includes former San Diego trumpeter Brian Lynch, with whom Palmieri shared a 2007 Best Latin Jazz Album Grammy win for “Simpatico” by The Brian Lynch/Eddie Palmieri Project.

“Nobody alive compares with Eddie. He pioneered Latin jazz and he’s the last man standing from his generation of innovators,” said eight-year Palmieri band mainstay Louis Fouché. He is also the alto saxophonist in Stay Human, the house band on TV’s “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

“The energy Eddie puts into his music is incredible,” Fouché continued. “And his latest album, ‘Mi Luz Mayor,’ is — I think — historic.”

Featuring guest singers Gilberto Santa Rosa and Herman Olivera, Palmieri’s new album is a rarity for its era — a full-blown Latin music big band album. Along with two new Palmieri originals, it features classic songs he and his late wife, Iraida, cherished in their youth and danced to at home in their later years.

But this is no mere cha-cha down memory lane. Palmieri approaches this music with obvious reverence, but also gives it a fresh, contemporary edge to ensure “Mi Lus Mayor” is more than an exercise in well-honed nostalgia.

“The way Eddie brings together some of the old with some of the new is mind-blowing to me,” saxophonist Fouché said.

Palmieri speaks with a palpable depth of feeling about his wife, who died in 2014, and the new/old album he made in her memory. But he has another, more ambitious, goal with his upcoming album.

“If you listen to commercial radio, you really want to blow your brains out. And I’m in a good mood today!” said Palmieri, who hopes to provide a remedy for listeners, albeit one that may bypass radio.

“When I was 13, all the bodegas in New York had the radio on. And you could hear music by Machito and Tito Puente, all day long, that contained tension and release. What radio plays now is a disaster! It makes you fall asleep. There’s an excitement that comes out of our music, if it’s played properly.”

Palmieri chuckled approvingly when told it was difficult to think of another current major Latin jazz orchestra making albums like “Mi Luz Mayor.”

“You are now my favorite interviewer!” he said, then grew more serious.

“There’s a sadness in my heart, because no one else is making albums like this. They don’t know how. That spirit just doesn’t exist now.”

San Diego Symphony’s Jazz at the Jacobs presents Eddie Palmieri Latin Jazz Septet

When: 8 p.m. Saturday

Where: Jacobs Music Center’s Copley Symphony Hall, 750 B St., downtown

Tickets: $24-$56

Phone: (619) 235-0804

Online: sandiegosymphony.org

george.varga@sduniontribune.com

Twitter @georgevarga