Machito
Born Francisco Raúl Gutiérrez Grillo in Havana's Jesús María district, Machito sang backup in the city's top son groups before moving to New York in 1937. Founding the Afro-Cubans in 1940 with his brother-in-law Mario Bauzá as musical director, he fused Cuban rhythm with big-band jazz arranging on records like 1943's 'Tanga' — widely credited as the first true Afro-Cuban jazz composition — becoming a foundational architect of the mambo and Latin jazz that would define the decades after.
Bauzá, Machito's brother-in-law and the Afro-Cubans' musical director, hired the jazz-trained arrangers and soloists and shaped the band's entire fusion concept; by Machito's own account Bauzá "determined the character" of the group, even as Machito's own grounding as a Cuban son singer kept the clave honest.
listen for'Tanga,' generally credited as Bauzá's composition, is the blueprint; the same big-band-over-clave architecture, extended into a cha-cha-chá pulse, drives Machito's later 'Asia Minor.'
Machito's father kept contacts with influential Cuban musicians including Arsenio Rodríguez, and the Afro-Cubans borrowed directly from Rodríguez's conjunto innovations — most notably adding conga to a New York Latin band's rhythm section, something Rodríguez had pioneered in Havana but that hadn't yet crossed over.
listen forThe dense, son-montuno conga-and-tres groove of Rodríguez's 'Dile a Catalina' is the rhythmic DNA underneath Machito's horn-heavy 'No Hay Más Que un Pasó,' even after the arrangement gets a big-band jazz varnish.
As a teenager in Havana, Machito sang with the era's top son groups in the tradition Ignacio Piñeiro's Septeto Nacional had codified; that son cubano vocabulary — clave-anchored, call-and-response, horn-punctuated — is the Cuban foundation the Afro-Cubans dressed up in big-band jazz arranging.
listen forThe call-and-response coro and clave pulse of Piñeiro's 'Échale Salsita' is the same root system underneath the bigger, brassier 'Mambo Infierno' — strip away Machito's horn section and jazz voicings and the son is still right there.