Machito was born Francisco Raúl Grillo in Havana and grew up singing in the son and rumba groups that filled the city's streets. But the story of Machito really starts in New York, where he moved in the 1930s and reconnected with Mario Bauzá, his brother-in-law and a trumpeter who had already spent years inside the American big band machine, playing with Cab Calloway and other swing outfits. Together they had an idea that seems obvious now but wasn't back then: take the clave-driven rhythm section of Cuban dance music and put it underneath the horn arrangements and improvisational language of jazz. In 1940 they formed Machito and His Afro-Cubans, and the band became the lab where that idea got tested night after night.

What made the band different wasn't just that it mixed styles — plenty of bands dabbled in "Latin flavor" as a novelty. Machito's outfit built the rhythm section as the foundation, not the garnish. The congas, bongos, timbales, and clave stayed locked in true Cuban time while the saxophones and trumpets played bebop-inflected lines on top. It swung and it moved your hips at the same time, which sounds simple until you actually try to arrange for it.

By the late 1940s, the jazz world had noticed. Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker both recorded with Machito's band, and the Cuban-jazz fusion picked up a name: Cubop. The high point on record is probably the Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite (1950), arranged by the Cuban composer Chico O'Farrill, which stretched the format into something closer to a concert piece — long-form, harmonically ambitious, still built on that unshakeable rhythmic floor. A few years later came Kenya (1957), often cited as one of the richest Afro-Cuban jazz records ever made, dense with percussion and horn writing that still sounds startling.

Machito kept working for decades, through the mambo craze, through the rise of salsa, right up until he won a Grammy in 1982 for Machito and His Salsa Big Band (1982). He died in 1984, on stage in London, mid-performance — which is either a terrible way to go or exactly the way a bandleader like him would have wanted it. Musicians from Tito Puente to later generations of Latin jazz players built directly on ground he and Bauzá cleared. He didn't invent Cuban music or jazz, obviously. He just figured out, earlier and more thoroughly than almost anyone, how to make them talk to each other.