Nobody agrees on where or when Frank Grillo, known as Machito, was born. Sources say Havana or Tampa, and 1908, 1912, or 1915. This deep dive argues that the ambiguity fits a man who refused to choose sides. Raised in Havana’s Jesus Maria district alongside his foster sister Graciela, he moved to New York in 1937, formed the Afro-Cubans in 1940, and in 1941 hired his brother-in-law Mario Bauza as musical director, launching a 34-year partnership that replaced the swing drum kit with congas, bongos, maracas, and the clave.

The episode explains what Machito actually did while Bauza wrote the arrangements, how a wartime draft and leg injury brought Graciela to New York as co-star, and how the band renamed a tune Cubop City and played Carnegie Hall with Duke Ellington and Bud Powell. It then covers his mentorship of a teenage Willie Bobo, his pan-Latino marriage to Puerto Rican Hilda Torres, 22 summers at the Concord Resort in the Catskills, the painful 1975 split when Bauza and Graciela quit over a downsized band, a 1983 Grammy for an album recorded in about four hours, and his death after a stroke backstage at Ronnie Scott’s in 1984.

• How Bauza and Machito gutted the American big band rhythm section and rebuilt it around Cuban percussion
• Why the early hit Sopa de Pichon was a dark joke about immigrant survival in New York
• Sessions with Charlie Parker and Stan Kenton that pulled the jazz world toward Latin rhythms
• Drafting his son Mario Jr. and daughter Paula to keep the band alive after the 1975 rift
• The 1985 renaming of an East Harlem intersection as Machito Square