Cuban conga legend Chano Pozo, who died in 1948, belonged to two worlds. The descendant of West African slaves brought to Cuba in the 18th century to harvest the island’s sugar crop, Pozo grew up in a communal apartment complex that had once been a slave quarter. He practiced the Yoruba religion, was schooled in Lucumí chants, and was a member of a secret Abakua brotherhood, the Cuban "leopard society," which was founded to preserve the values and beliefs of Africans from Cameroon and Nigeria. He also saw himself in Shangó, the Yoruban god of thunder, who draped himself in red robes and appeared to his disciples by dancing on their heads as two bolts of lightening. Pozo waved a red handkerchief over his drum, and once his songs started to bring in some money, he paraded around his poor Havana neighborhood in a red satin robe — Shangó gone barrio fabulous.

Pozo’s other world was ’40s bebop New York City, where he took off his shirt on the stage of the Rumba Matinee club, greased his chest and arms with oil, and chanted and drummed his way into the history of jazz. Although he was not the first Afro-Cuban to think about the merger of Cuban rhythms and bebop improvisation, he was the first to give it a compositional future, finding a way to put Cuba into Dizzy Gillespie & George Russell’s "Cubana Be, Cubana Bop" and to help create bebop standards synonymous with urban African-America — "Tin Tin Deo," "Manteca" — that were structured around the Lucum’ chants that he grew up singing.

When Pozo died, both of his worlds had an explanation. New York said he had been shot by someone he had beaten up over a batch of bad pot. Havana said he was being punished for disobeying Shang— by never being formally initiated into santer’a (the Afro-Cuban mix of Yoruba with new-world Christianity) before he left the island for New York. New York may have had the body and some witnesses, but Havana had the real proof: Pozo died just as festivities celebrating Shang— were about to begin.

In her 1982 poem "I See Chano Pozo," Jayne Cortez called him a "connector of two worlds," the Atlantic-island link between African tradition in Cuba and the new-world modernity that would turn the 2/4 rhythms of the Afro-Cuban conga drum into the 4/4 Afro-American drums of bop. The drum had all the stories wrapped into its skin. Chano used his hands to release them, to turn them from dried flesh and silence into living rhythm and pounded memory. "You go see the slave castles, you go see the massacres," Cortez wrote. "You go conjurate, you go mediate, you go to the cemetery of drums, return and tell us about it."

As you can hear on the three CDs that make up Chano Pozo: El tambor de Cuba (Tumbao Cuban Classics) — which at long last make available almost everything Pozo touched from his early Cuban orquesta recordings in 1939 up through his 1947-’48 New York "Cubop" sessions with Gillespie, Milt Jackson, and James Moody — Pozo went, returned, and didn’t just tell us about what he saw but turned them into songs that would keep the dead alive by giving them new identities year after year. They emerged in the Havana street comparsas, or carnival bands, that he reigned over in the ’30s, when blacks weren’t allowed to play Cuban dancehalls. They emerged in the Orquesta Casino de la Playa, with Miguelito V‡ldez singing the foundational Pozo rumbas "Blen, Blen, Blen" and "Ari–a–ara." They emerged when Pozo led his own groups and orchestras in the ’40s — his Conjunto Azul, his Ritmo de Tambores. And they emerged in Carnegie Hall, where Pozo sat in the front row of the bandstand in his gray suit and black tie next to Gillespie pulsing through Charlie Parker’s "Relaxin’ at Camarillo."

No matter what musical conversations he was invited into, Pozo (to riff on a famous Gillespie remark) was always speaking African. Whereas their lighter skin helped compatriots Valdez and Desi Arnaz to reach commercial success on Broadway and in popular orchestras, there was no mistaking Pozo’s blackness, and no mistaking his intent to shove the African past and the Afro-Cuban present into the face of American jazz. "Chano’s concept came from Africa," George Russell is quoted in the box’s notes. "When I heard it, it sounded on fire to me, the mixing of the standard American drumming together with the Afro-Cuban thing."

In the Abakua society, the symbol for the coming of death is a tree with wilted branches hanging down from its leaves. The trunk of the tree extends down into a root that is a perfect quartered-circle. It looks like the face of a drum, the circle that caps the conga and contains the rhythms that connect one world to another.