The piano intro on Breezin' isn't George Benson. It's this man.

In 1976 George Benson released Breezin' and won the Grammy for Record of the Year.

The piano intro on "This Masquerade," the four bars that open the whole album before Benson plays a single note, that's Jorge Dalto.

An Argentine from Hurlingham who left Buenos Aires at 22, passed through Curaçao, landed in New York, worked his way through Tito Puente and Dizzy Gillespie, and ended up splitting the keyboard chair in Benson's band with Ronnie Foster.

The same year Breezin' came out, Dalto walked into a studio and made his own record. Chevere. United Artists, 1976.

He opens it on "Stella By Starlight" and closes the A side on Herbie Hancock's "Dolphin Dance," moving between jazz standard repertoire and his own compositions like a man with nothing to prove in either direction.

The instrumentation is Fender Rhodes, Clavinet, ARP Solina, Minimoog, with Ronnie Foster back alongside him adding more keys. Bernard Purdie on drums. The Latin influence that shaped everything Dalto heard growing up sits underneath the music rather than on top of it. It doesn't announce itself. It just changes how the whole record moves.

Produced by Teddy Reig, whose career went back to Count Basie and Charlie Parker sessions, and who would not produce another album after this one. Singing background vocals, in what the session engineer later described as his first session outside the Latin world, a young Panamanian vocalist named Rubén Blades. Two years before Siembra. Two years before Pedro Navaja. Nobody in that room could have known.

The album is dedicated to Carlos Martin, the congas player who appears throughout. He died before the record was released.

Dalto died of cancer in 1987. He was 39. Chevere got lost on release and found its people slowly, the way records like this always do.