"If one man can be called the father of Latin jazz-a dynamic and irresistible fusion of Cuban rhythms with jazz harmony and improvisation-it's Machito, the fabled Cuban bandleader. The music of Machito, who died in 1984 at age 75, sparked the mambo dance craze of the late 1940s and '50s, had a major impact on modern jazzmen such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and is still at the core of contemporary salsa music. Machito: A Latin Jazz Legacy, a superb documentary by Carlos Ortiz, traces Machito's remarkable 50-year career. And it explores the musical environment of New York before and after World War II. Machito was still alive when Ortiz began this project, and his relaxed on-camera recollections form the basis of the film's narration. Spliced into these interview segments, and others with Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon and Ray Barretto, are some extraordinary archival photographs and film footage of musicians and dancers. The dancing-including live footage of Cubans doing rumbas in the 1920s and mambo-crazed New Yorkers twirling and twisting to Machito's music in the 1940s-is astonishing in its energy and invention. 'There was no Spanish radio in New York in those days,' says Federico Pagani, who produced the first historic dances, featuring Machito's Afro-Cubans at the fabled Palladium ballroom. 'You had to go to dances to hear the music.' Using Black jazzmen and Cuban percussionists, Machito created a new American music that merged authentic Cuban rumbas and mambos with Big Band jazz. His music did more than bridge diverse musical elements; it brought together people from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Machito's band drew an integrated crowd of mambo-mad dancers, and that was new, too. 'Italian and Jewish girls came from Brooklyn to hear us,' recalls Mario Bauza, Machito's brother-in-law trumpeter, who wrote most of the band's innovative arrangements. 'It was the beginning of integration.' " -Jesse Hamlin, S.F. Chronicle