Artist: Gato Barbieri

Leandro "Gato" Barbieri was an Argentine  jazz  tenor saxophonist who rose to fame during the free jazz movement in the 1960s, and is known for his  Latin jazz recordings of the 1970s. His nickname, Gato, is Spanish for "cat". 

He played the clarinet and later the alto saxophone  while performing with Argentine pianist Lalo Schifrin  in the late 1950s. By the early 1960s, while playing in Rome, he also worked with the trumpeter Don Cherry.

Eventually influenced by John Coltrane's late recordings, as well as those from other free jazz saxophonists such as Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders, he began to develop the warm and gritty tone with which he is associated.  

In the late 1960s, he was fusing music from South America into his playing and contributed to multi-artist projects like Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra  and Carla Bley's Escalator over the Hill. His score for Bernardo Bertolucci's 1972 film Last Tango in Paris earned him a Grammy Award and led to a record deal with Impulse! Records.

By the mid-1970s, he was recording for A&M Records and moved his music towards soul-jazz and jazz-pop. Caliente! (1976) included his best-known song, a rendition of Carlos Santana's "Europa".  Caliente! and his follow-up album, Ruby Ruby (1977) were both produced by fellow musician and label co-founder, Herb Alpert.