Eddie Palmieri built the house that salsa moved into and refused to say the word, dismissing it as a cheap marketing term for the complexity of New York Latin music. This episode follows him from his birth in Manhattan in December 1936 to Puerto Rican parents from Ponce, through a South Bronx childhood in the shadow of his older brother Charlie, an established piano phenom nine years his senior. Eddie played classical piano at Carnegie Hall at 11, formed his own band at 14, and spent the 1950s in Tito Rodríguez's orchestra before forming Conjunto La Perfecta in 1961 and committing what the episode calls sonic violence against the charanga tradition: he gutted the violins and replaced them with heavy trombones led by Barry Rogers, paired with the Mozambique rhythm, a sound Charlie jokingly dubbed the trombanga.

From there the episode digs in ...