In early 1930s Spanish Harlem, a hyperactive seven-year-old drove his neighbors crazy banging on pots, pans, and window frames. His mother responded with 25-cent piano lessons. This episode follows how that noisy kid, Ernest Anthony Puente Jr., became Tito Puente, the King of the Timbales, and how a lifetime of unexpected experiences, from an ankle injury that ended a dance career to combat in World War II, synthesized into a sound that revolutionized Latin jazz.

We trace his early influences, including Gene Krupa and the Afro-Cuban rhythms he absorbed in San Juan, his teenage stint replacing the drafted drummer in Machito’s band, and his three years in the Navy aboard the USS Santee, where he served as a machine gunner in nine battles while mailing big band arrangements home on V-mail. The conversation covers his study of Asian scales and chord voicings in fourths after the war, his years at Juilliard under a Japanese conducting instructor, and his decision to move percussion to the front of the stage as the Palladium Ballroom became the home of the mambo.

• Why the Palladium’s integrated crowds of Black, white, and Latino dancers made it a social movement as much as a dance hall
• What timbales actually are and how Puente turned a timekeeping instrument into a solo voice
• The mechanics of son, mambo, and cha-cha-cha and how Carlos Santana carried Oye Como Va to a rock audience
• His appearances in The Mambo Kings, on Sesame Street, and as a suspect in The Simpsons episode Who Shot Mr. Burns
• Honorary doctorates from Berklee and Columbia, the renaming of East 110th Street, and why he always called himself a street musician