Composers
Mario Bauza
More than likely, Mario Bauzá was the one musician responsible for mixing jazz with Afro-Cuban music. Stan Kenton, another legendary big band leader, called Mario Bauzá "the greatest exponent of Afro-Cuban Jazz". Mario Bauzá was a multi-instrumentalist that got his start on woodwinds with the Havana Philharmonic from Cuba. Mario moved to New York in 1930’s and found work with Chick Web as musical director, Cab Calloway, and with his brother-in-law Frank "Machito" Grillo. He also worked with many other jazz artists such as Ella Fitzgerald and Don Redman. It was with the Cab Calloway orchestra where Mario befriended Dizzy Gillespie and introduced Dizzy to percussionist, Luciano "Chano" Pozo Gonzalez, whom together collaborated on one of the first Afro-Cuban hits "Manteca" and "Tin Tin Deo". It was however Mario Bauzá who during his time with Machito (1941-1976) encouraged Machito to use jazz soloists such as Charlie Parker and Flip Phillips in the solos of his recordings thus planting the seed for the emergence of Afro-Cuban jazz or Latin jazz.
