The Truth: La Verdad

This is a late-'80s date for the Eddie Palmieri big band featuring a loose and wonderfully expansive mix of Latin beat, salsa, Cuban son, and rumba. As is typical of a Palmieri date, this one is slick with mid-to-extended length tunes. The band, featuring Charlie Sepulveda on trumpet, Giovanni Hidalgo on bata, congas, and assorted percussion, along with Anthony Carrillo and Jose Ramirez. Juan Pablo Torres also plays trombone, with his brother Ralph on second trumpet. Palmieri, of course, in addition to his roles as bandleader and arranger -- as well as composer of four of the album's six tracks -- as always plays a gorgeous piano. The thing about this man's bands, with their groups of singers, call-and-response lyrics, and gloriously uplifting tone, is that they are so musically complex while remaining thoroughly accessible to the listener. The title track, an original with its round of singers taking verse, chorus, and bridge swirling around a plethora of horns and bata drums, moving to underscore the shifting rhythmic signatures and accents that carry the words. It's a weave, and Palmieri is fully in control of its construction and placement. The furious lower register piano dissonance that opens his solo, "Lisa," is uncharacteristic for Palmieri, and one of his first forays into more classically oriented form, its glissando ushers in a modal framework built on extended minor sevenths and ninths circling around a small fantasia theme that briefly touches upon boogie woogie and "Autumn Leaves." It's all funk and backbeat slip and slide on "Noble Cruise," with its striated piano accents in between the swagger of the warring horns. The harmonies Palmieri constructs before the rhythm section enters are knotty and deft. When they do enter, it's a free for all of counterpoint, shifting Cuban forms and folk elements with a swinging big band all the way through "Buscandote," which closes the disc. One has to wonder if this cat has ever cut a loser? Anybody know? Highly recommended.by Thom Jurek