The original Latin ambassador

Eddie Palmieri is waiting in the lobby of the Carlton Hotel in San Francisco, scanning a folded newspaper for baseball scores.

“I used to be a Giants fan before they moved out here,” he confesses.

He’s not bitter. More like nostalgic for the early days of Willie Mays. It’s hard to be a Mets fan today, but he persists — even after they collapsed last year.

On a sunny day in early April, he’s dressed in jeans, a knit golf shirt and a Nike baseball cap. He used to smoke “the best cigars.” Cuban trumpet player Chocolate Armentero turned him on to Cohibas and Montecristos. But four years ago he decided to “give his lungs a break.”

The secret to his stamina was once watercress and parsley salads, he jokes. Today, at 71, “there’s no big secret. I just love what I do.”

He’s hardly exaggerating when he says, “I’ve been all over the world in the past three weeks.”

England. France. Germany. A pit-stop in New York before jetting off to Singapore and Hong Kong.

Later that night, the storied bandleader known for making jazz piano dance to Latin rhythms — and the first musician to ever win a Grammy for Latin music, long before there were Latin Grammys — would explore “the Latin Side of Wayne Shorter” with trombonist Conrad Herwig in a San Francisco Jazz Festival tribute.

On June 1, he returns to the Bay Area for an afternoon show in the park at the Healdsburg Jazz Festival with his band, including Herwig, trumpeter Brian Lynch, bassist Luques Curtis and percussionists Jose Claussell and “Little Johnny” Rivero.

But, no matter how much he loves what he does — a sentiment he repeats several times in an hourlong interview that reaches from the Moors conquering Spain (and using drums in battle) to the plight of the modern jazz musician — he says playing the live circuit today “doesn’t even compare” to the heyday of New York’s Palladium Ballroom in the ’50s and ’60s.

Back then you had to flash your cabaret card to explain why you were working Uptown. Then you worked four nights a week, four sets a night for a total of 16 shows, raking in a grand total of $72.

“And they took out taxes,” he adds. “It was a financial disaster.”

His first recording, for Tito Rodriquez, was “Live at the Palladium.”

“All of the best dancers in the world were there. They didn’t come to hang out, they came to dance.”

The mambo craze had already swept the globe. On Wednesdays, it was mostly a Jewish clientele. On the weekends, Hollywood stars flocked. Marlo Brando liked to drop in and play bongos. Kim Novak was a regular.

This was at 53rd and Broadway in Manhattan. A block away at Birdland, Count Basie, Stan Getz and Duke Ellington would drop in on any given night.

“You can’t compare to it now,” Palmieri says. “That was all you heard, on the streets or at the bodega — the grocery store — or commercial radio. You would hear those bands on commercial radio. You don’t hear that anymore. You turn on commercial radio now and you’ll hear either Mex-Tex or Latin pop artists. There’s nothing wrong with them, but they don’t have that fever that we had.”

When he formed his own band, the groundbreaking La Perfecta in 1961, he was riffing off the popular Cuban dance music called charanga and the dance pachanga. But instead of leading with trumpets, he beefed up the horn section with more trombones, creating a style all his own — something his older brother, the late pianist Charlie Palmieri, would christen “Trombanga” in album liner notes.

His first Grammy win came in 1974 for “The Sun of Latin Music.” An album that took his influences, namely Thelonious Monk and McCoy Tyner, and filtered them through long grooves and complex strains of salsa inflected jazz, it would usher in decades of accolades. Just last year, he notched his ninth Grammy for the Brian Lynch collaboration “Simpatico.”

A charismatic Latin ambassador for so many decades, he watches now with a sense of Darwinian regret as “Reggae-ton has come in and hip-hop has come in,” he says. In Puerto Rico, the dance and salsa orchestras used to play all month long. “They only play one or two gigs a month now.”

Sizing up the prospects of young rising jazz players today, “they have their hands full,” he says. “It’s very sad. You don’t have record companies who are coming around looking to sign new talent. You gotta record on your own. You gotta find someone to release it. You’re starting out already in debt. Like coming out of college already $100,000 in debt.”

Even though he once threatened to quit the music business in 2000 (he was really just “pulling back” from so much touring, he says), he imagines leading a band until the day he dies.

“Unless I win the Lotto,” he jokes.

“You don’t stop, man. You just keep going and you enjoy it. And then the young kids keep on coming along. I’ve had the best percussionists. And young horn players. David Sanchez — when I see how respected he is now — I took him out of Puerto Rico. The first gig was in Europe, even though he didn’t like to fly. All of a sudden, he’s on stage opposite Miles Davis.”

It’s moments like that, he says, regardless of the then and now, the old versus the next new thing, when it all comes down to the most primal of urges: “I know that when I play my music, it’s designed for dancing,” he says. “It’s engineered for that. I love to see them dancing. That’s my thing. That’s what makes it one on one with the band.”