2025 GRAMMY award winning Zaccai Curtis leans into what he describes as “two sides of the same coin” within Afro-Cuban jazz: Instrumental Mambo Jazz (a phrase coined by his mentor Eddie Palmieri), and Cubop. The former fuses jazz melodies and improvisation with Mambo music, and was spearheaded in the 1940s by Mario Bauzá, the musical director of the ensemble Machito and his Afro-Cubans. Curtis delineates Cubop as “bebop composition with Afro-Cuban elements in the rhythm section,” or at least veers “more toward the bebop side” of the musical fusion.