Eddy Palermo was born June 10, 1956, in Rome, and taught himself guitar from around age ten. He made his professional debut in 1977 on tour with singer Lilian Terry, then spent 1978 working the Rome jam-session circuit alongside altoist Massimo Urbani, clarinetist Tony Scott, pianist Enrico Pieranunzi and bassist Riccardo Del Fra. In 1979 he joined the teaching staff of Rome's Centro Jazz "Saint Louis" as a jazz guitar instructor, a post that anchored his career for decades and later grew into the Saint Louis Music College, where he continued to teach; he also held jazz guitar posts at the Conservatorio "Ottorino Respighi" in Latina and at the Universita della Musica.

His leader debut, The Way I See (1981, Edipan), opened a recording career built around trio and quartet formats. Over the following decades Palermo shared stages and studios with a run of visiting American jazz figures - Chet Baker, George Coleman, Bill Smith, David Sanborn, Tony Scott, Jim Hall, Lee Konitz, Joe Pass, Ray Mantilla, Bucky Pizzarelli, Tony Monaco and George Garzone among them - while remaining active within the Italian scene alongside singer Bruno Martino, saxophonist Stefano Di Battista, trumpeter Flavio Boltro, drummer Roberto Gatto and pianist Romano Mussolini, with whom he recorded a promotional-only 1982 trio session (billed "Trio Romano Mussolini, Massimo Moriconi, Pici Mazzei Plus Eddy Palermo, Wilfred Copello"), part of the same circle of younger Rome musicians documented on Mussolini's own profile.

By the mid-1980s Palermo's playing had taken on the second, defining strand of his style: a personal fusion of jazz-guitar harmony with Brazilian samba and bossa nova rhythm, which he is credited as one of the first Italian jazz guitarists to develop at length. My Latin Feeling (1988, Phrases) and The Song Is You (1992, Dona Records) built on that language before he relocated to Brazil in 1998, where he worked directly with Carioca musicians including Roberto Menescal, Joao Donato, Wanda Sa, Pery Ribeiro, Leny Andrade, Miucha and keyboardist Jose Roberto Bertrami of Azymuth (a 2001 studio credit on Bertrami's Things Are Different), and with Brazilian guitarist Toninho Horta, a connection reported by his own biography and AllMusic around the albums Meu Brasil Brasileiro (2000) and Brincando Entre Amigos (2005) but not corroborated at the Discogs credit level in this pass (see eddy-palermo_notes.md). Two Parallel Colours (2008) reunited him on record with his own former student, guitarist Antonio Onorato, and Bossa Jam Session (2008) paired him in a co-billed duo with Roberto Menescal.

Palermo also had a brief run of Italian television work in this period: incidental music for the Canale 5 variety programs Finalmente Venerdi (1989-90) and Il Gioco Dei Giochi (1991), and a 1996-97 collaboration with RAI on the talk show Mi Manda Lubrano. On record, that same era produced a handful of sideman credits alongside Italian pop and light-entertainment names - actor-singer Gianluca Guidi's Eddy And Me (1990, a title punning on Palermo's own name), singer Donatella Pandimiglio's Stage (1989) and singer-songwriter Rosybyndy's Il Portiere Di Riserva (2004) - a real but numerically small share of his output (4 of 28 Discogs-documented credits) next to a jazz-tagged leader catalog that runs from 1981 to 2019 and a teaching career spent entirely inside jazz-guitar pedagogy; see Style & Influences below for the full accounting.

Palermo has performed at Ischia Jazz (1980), Umbria Jazz (1982-85), Messina Jazz (1985) and, most consistently, Rome's Villa Celimontana jazz festival (1995-2022), as well as international festival dates in Istanbul, Houston and Brasilia. He is cited in the Grande Enciclopedia Del Jazz (1982) and in later Italian jazz-guitar reference works. A 2015 health issue requiring rehabilitation is noted on his own teaching-institution biography; he has continued to record and perform since, including Brazilian Duets (2019, Eddy Palermo & Friends).

Palermo's playing is rooted in the vocabulary of classic jazz guitar - the two American guitarists most often named alongside him in his own biographies are Jim Hall and Joe Pass, both frequent stage partners - carried into a personal, decades-long fusion with Brazilian samba and bossa nova rhythm and harmony. Of the 28 Discogs-documented artist-relationship credits found under his own artist entity, every one of his 11 leader or co-leader releases carries "Jazz" as a Discogs genre tag, with "Fusion," "Latin Jazz," "Contemporary Jazz" and "Samba"/"Bossa Nova"-adjacent styles the dominant recurring tags across The Way I See (1981), Ganimede (1983), My Latin Feeling (1988, additionally tagged Latin), The Song Is You (1992), Meu Brasil Brasileiro (2000), Brincando Entre Amigos (2005, additionally tagged Latin/MPB), Two Parallel Colours (2008) and Bossa Jam Session (2008, additionally tagged Bossa Nova). A minority of his sideman credits sit outside jazz proper: Gianluca Guidi's Eddy And Me (1990) is Discogs-tagged Pop only, and two 2013 various-artists compilation cameos (a track on Bossa Nova (Deluxe) and one on the Brazuca World Cup soundtrack) are tagged Latin/Bossanova/Samba with no Jazz tag - a small, clearly bounded handful of credits against a jazz-tagged leader catalog spanning nearly forty years and a teaching career (Saint Louis Music College, Conservatorio "Ottorino Respighi" di Latina, Universita della Musica) spent entirely within jazz guitar pedagogy. Two more of his sideman credits - singer Donatella Pandimiglio's Stage (1989) and singer-songwriter Rosybyndy's Il Portiere Di Riserva (2004) - carry both "Jazz" and "Pop" Discogs tags, read here as vocal-jazz-adjacent light entertainment rather than straight pop session work. On balance, the honest read of his catalog is a sustained, primary jazz career built around a signature Brazilian-jazz fusion, with a real but minor and clearly bounded pop/light-entertainment side current, not the reverse.