Tito Puente, whose name was actually Ernest Anthony Puente Jr., was born in New York on the 20th of April 1923, son of Ernest Puente Sr. and Ercilia Ortíz, Puerto Ricans who’d set up home on the north side of Manhattan in the district known as Spanish Harlem, or El Barrio. He grew up during the Golden Age of Jazz: “I used to listen to the radio and heard all the great dance bands of the moment, like Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Duke Ellington; I used to love seeing them perform whenever they came to the theaters like the Strand or the Paramount, but above all my favorite was Gene Krupa. I managed to win a percussion contest where I played Krupa’s solo on ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ note-for-note.” Puente completed his musical training by taking lessons in both piano and percussion classics, meanwhile savouring the atmosphere of the streets, where a whole assortment of Latin bands galvanized the nocturnal life of Spanish Harlem. During the Forties, Latin rhythms began to insinuate themselves into the U.S. music scene, and ultimately establishing themselves as an integral part of it. By the end of the decade the rhumba, then the most popular of all the Latin rhythms, had gone through certain changes before a new rhythm appeared on the musical scene: the mambo. From 1948 the new rhythm was played in the Latin areas of New York by bands such as that of percussionist Tito Puente (born in el Barrio, New York), and of Puerto Rican singer Tito Rodriguez. Tito explained the rise of the mambo this way: “Rhythm is what you dance to, and the mambo is popular because its strong rhythms make for good dance music. What is making it even more successful is the combination of jazz elements with the mambo. Bop, for example, by itself has crazy sounds harmonically and is not easy to dance to. That’s why bop bands are putting in conga drums and adding a mambo flavor to their work. Similarly, in my band, I use certains aspects of jazz. In our arrangements we use some of the modern sounds in the manner of Dizzy Gillespie and Stan Kenton, but we never lose the authenticity of the Latin rhythm.” In New York City, the mambo era was enjoying its peak moments, culminating at the end of 1951 with the old and illustrious Palladium Dance Hall being converted into THE place for the mambo. It was there that the orchestras of Tito Puente, Tito Rodriguez and Machito were constantly performing, and the whole phenomena of the mambo by far exceeded the craze of the tango some thirty years before.