What Is Your Life

R.I.P. to the very great Eddie Palmieri. Also: Durand Bernarr, ELHAE, Patrice Rushen, Tyla, Rev. C.L. Franklin, and much more.

Hello and welcome back to Vinson Cunningham’s Quiet Storm.

Man. Rest in Peace to the legend, the genius, the god Eddie Palmieri, out of whose fingers and mind and mouth flowed so many traditions, each finding new developments and surprising syntheses in his music. I first heard Palmieri’s work—without knowing, initially, who had made it—on the sidewalks of Harlem and Washington Heights. Old heads played it on hot afternoons, lolling under awnings. Sometimes my barber put it on. Palmieri was an endlessly sophisticated artist of the people; his tunes’ true habitat was the street.

Last year, I saw him in concert at the Blue Note, alongside my good friend Carina, who later wrote the definitive profile of the great man as a lion in winter. Everybody clapped the son clave in slapping collaboration as Palmieri laid down increasingly dissonant pads and barks and sobs and hollers of unexpected harmony. You could tell: he was in love with each member of his band. I can’t wait for people to see his—now somewhat sad—film-stealing sequence in the new Spike Lee film, Highest 2 Lowest. Like Lee, Palmieri belongs to New Yorkers, and we to him. May flights of angels sing him to his rest.

Listener JLM, commenting on “Night Time is the Right Time,” two editions ago, writes this:

I did not know the Os Mutantes version of Baby, only the Gal Costa one from the album Tropicalia !

Do you know the album Clube Da Esquina by Milton Nascimiento and Lô Borges ? This is one of the best things ever.

I hadn’t known Clube da Esquina, the first album by the collective of the same name, which highlights the sacerdotally pure songwriting talents of Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges. Now I have cleansed my ears by dipping into it all week. Under its influence, I bought the book Os sonhos não envelhecem (roughly: Dreams Never Grow Old), by Márcio Borges, the famous lyricist who co-founded the group. My new language-learning challenge will be to translate it for myself, a paragraph at a time. Shout out to you, JLM.

As today’s quote—as always, just beneath the playlist—will reveal, I have been reading The Garden Against Time, a beguiling, generous, impossibly erudite work of criticism about gardening and all of its thousands of implications, by Olivia Laing, a writer I very much admire. Incidentally, a new profile of Jamaica Kincaid—perhaps our foremost gardener/writer—was published this week in the Times Magazine. It’s by Niela Orr and it’s very enjoyable to read.

This past weekend, walking deep into Bushwick on Myrtle Avenue (I was looking for a piñata, don’t ask), a car drove by, blasting some tune. An older woman was walking toward me. She’d caught the spirit of the song, was instantaneously inhabited by it, and she started singing it with real commitment, hand motions and all. I like it when a melody spreads like an idea.

Until next week, Keep Storming:

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“In another acutely recognizable scene [of Milton’s Paradise Lost], Eve lays herself open to danger because of her insistence on working unaccompanied in a favorite spot, a concealed grove of roses she’s been sculpting and shaping. Too real! She pleads with Adam to let her go there on her own, arguing they’ll get more done in separate spheres, without the distractions of ‘casual discourse,’ aka chatting. Plausible, but I suspected what she really wanted was to be alone, the only possible way to dissolve back into relation with the vegetal world…”

—Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time