Chano Pozo came out of Havana's rough neighborhoods, where he'd already made a name for himself as a dancer, composer, and street rumba percussionist before he ever set foot in the United States. He didn't read music. He barely spoke English when Dizzy Gillespie hired him in 1947 on the recommendation of Mario Bauzá. None of that mattered once he sat down behind a conga drum in front of a big band full of bebop musicians who had never played with anything like him.

What Pozo brought wasn't just Cuban flavor sprinkled on top of jazz. He brought actual rhythmic structure — clave, layered patterns, call-and-response chants rooted in Abakuá and Santería traditions — and forced the band to reorganize around it. The results are still startling to hear: "Manteca," which Pozo co-wrote with Gillespie and Gil Fuller, has a bass line so hypnotic it barely needs the horns. "Cubano Be, Cubano Bop," arranged by George Russell, drops Pozo into the middle of a Gillespie big band chart and lets him chant and holler in Cuban dialect over full orchestral bebop. It shouldn't work. It works.

Pozo wasn't a jazz musician trying to learn Cuban music, or a Cuban musician trying to learn jazz. He just played what he knew, at full volume, and trusted the band to catch up. Gillespie, to his credit, didn't try to tame him or translate him into something more digestible — he built arrangements that gave Pozo room to be exactly as loud and rhythmically insistent as he wanted to be. That collaboration is the reason Afro-Cuban rhythm became a permanent wing of jazz instead of a passing novelty act.

He didn't get much time to build on it. Pozo was shot and killed in a Harlem bar in December 1948, barely a year after "Manteca" was recorded. He was thirty-three. It's tempting to wonder what another decade of Pozo and Gillespie together might have produced, but even the short version of the story did the job — every conga player who followed him into jazz, from Mongo Santamaria to Candido Camero, was walking through a door Pozo kicked open.