And he was productive: He first worked in the trumpet sections of big bands, until he stepped forward and led the small-group revolution, creating fast, intricate new music known as bebop and pioneering Afro-Cuban jazz.
Well-known groups like Ketageta(ph) were mixing jazz with Afro-Cuban rhythms, so the government decided to host an annual jazz festival, which drew crowds from all over the world.
An early encounter with Dizzy Gillespie's Afro-Cuban music persuaded Acuna that she could find original common ground between the Latin music of her youth and the modern jazz idiom.