Havana may be a city associated with the political revolution of the late 1950s, but it had already experienced a musical one a decade earlier. Musicians like the Lopez brothers, Israel and Orestes, and the bandleader Arsenio Rodriguez were using syncopation and powerful jazz-flavoured line-ups in new ways, and the resulting dance-style, ritmo nuevo danzon, was considered such a scandal in polite Havana society that some clubs even banned it. The descarga, or Afro-Cuban spontaneous jam, also burst out of the same musical upheavals.
This was the tumultuous background to the early musical experiences of Arturo (Chico) O'Farrill, the composer, arranger and trumpeter who died on July 4th aged 79.
He was born into a well-to-do family in Havana - his father was Irish and his mother was German.
He studied classical composition, but by the mid 1940s was playing trumpet in a dance band. In l948, he left the Cuban capital for New York at apoint in jazz history when the rhythmic connections between the Cuban evolution of African music and the American one were beginning to be fruitfully explored by Dizzy Gillespie amongst others.
He soon found himself in demand. He was hired by a variety of big-time jazz bandleaders - including Benny Goodman, Stan Kenton, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, as well as his fellow Cuban emigre, Machito - to inject his special chemistry into their music.
As a musician with a sophisticated and classically-derived awareness of harmony and structure, yet a modernist's understanding of bop - and a vivid imagination as to the ways in which Cuban musical ideas could be spliced into big-band jazz -"Chico" O'Farrill
Chico O'Farrill brought together Machito's Orchestra with Charlie Parker. He also worked for Benny Goodman at a time when the swing-era star was trying to adapt his repertoire to new jazz forms.
The fashion for Afro-Cuban music led Chico O'Farrill to form his own orchestra around the core of Machito's rhythm section, and he recorded extensively for Norman Granz's Verve label. There is a mellow energy to these sessions that testifies to Chico O'Farrill's skilfulness with orchestral colour, but the music - like a good deal of his work - is never shy about milking an attractive lick.
There was considerable variety, however, in the two Afro-Cuban jazz suites he produced, in 1950 and 1952, with Machito, even if music for dancing is clearly the uppermost priority.
In the early 1950s Chico O'Farrill took his own group into New York's Birdland,, toured the United States and, between 1951 and 1952, recorded an album called Jazz.
At the end of the decade, he moved to Mexico but returned to the US in 1965 and settled in New York, taking up a staff job as arranger and music director for the CBS television show, Festival Of The Lively Arts.
In an attempt to slipstream the commercial success of the rock boom of the 1960s, many jazz bandleaders offered their own arrangements of pop hits, and Chico O'Farrill and Quincy Jones provided this service for Count Basie in the mid-60s.
He continued to work with Basie and Clark Terry's bands in both Latin and more straight-ahead styles, and wrote pieces for the Argentinian saxophonist Gato Barbieri, for Stan Kenton (1974) and a reunion of Gillespie and Machito (1975).
During 1998 and 1999, a number of younger Afro-Cuban jazz musicians, including trumpeter Arturo Sandoval and Chico O'Farrill's pianist son, Arturo Chico O'Farrill jnr, recorded Heart Of A Legend (Milestone), a homage to this father-figure of the genre, and captured much of the heat and exuberance that characterised O'Farrill's his best work.
He was no admirer of music for reflection, but, as a no-messing virtuoso of the art of splicing Cuban dance with jazz sassiness and left-field drive, Chico O'Farrill made a special place for himself in 20th century musical history.
Arturo (Chico) O'Farrill, composer, arranger and trumpeter,: born October 1921; died, July 2001.