Tito Puente

Ernesto Antonio Puente Jr., known as Tito, was born on 20 April 1923 at Harlem Hospital in New York City, the son of Puerto Rican parents, and grew up in Spanish Harlem. The sounds of Puerto Rican and Cuban music filled his childhood, and so did the big band music he loved on the radio. He took piano lessons and then studied percussion, and became a professional musician at 13.

He apprenticed in the Machito Orchestra, one of the great Latin jazz bands, served in the US Navy in the Second World War and then studied at the Juilliard School. He learned to play many instruments, including piano, saxophone, vibraphone and the timbales, the paired drums that became his signature. In 1948 he formed the band that became the Tito Puente Orchestra.

In the 1950s Puente, with musicians such as Tito Rodríguez and Pérez Prado, helped usher in the golden age of mambo. He took in other Latin and Afro-Cuban rhythms, including cha-cha, merengue and bossa nova, the styles that came to be called salsa. His 1958 album Dance Mania, released by RCA Victor, became his best-known work, and he brought the timbales to the front of the bandstand.

His most famous composition, Oye Como Va, first appeared on the 1962 album El Rey Bravo, and became known around the world when Carlos Santana recorded it in 1970. Others include Babarabatiri and Ran Kan Kan. He summed up his approach in a single sentence: we play jazz with the Latin touch. In the 1990s he played himself in the film The Mambo Kings and brought a new audience to his music.

Puente won five Grammy Awards in his lifetime, starting in 1979 with A Tribute to Benny Moré, and a Latin Grammy for Mambo Birdland, as well as a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, honorary degrees, presidential recognition and the Key to New York City. In early 2000 he appeared in the documentary Calle 54. After a show in Puerto Rico on 31 May he suffered a heart attack and was flown home for heart surgery, and died of complications in the early hours of 1 June 2000, aged 77. East 110th Street in Spanish Harlem was renamed Tito Puente Way.