Leandro Jose Barbieri was born in Rosario, Argentina, on November 28, 1932, into a family with musicians in it, and did not take up an instrument until he was 12, after hearing Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time." He started on clarinet, moved to Buenos Aires in 1947, and switched to alto saxophone and then to tenor. The nickname that stayed with him for life came from his schedule as a young player: he was working two bands at once, a tango orchestra and a jazz group, and had to run between the clubs at night, which got him called El Gato, the cat.

He played in Lalo Schifrin's Buenos Aires jazz orchestra in the 1950s, and Discogs has him on a Schifrin single dated 1956. In the early 1960s he left for Rome, where he worked in Italian film and television music alongside Piero Umiliani, Giorgio Gaslini and Franco Tonani, and where Don Cherry found him.

What followed was a decade inside the jazz avant-garde. He is the tenor player on Cherry's Complete Communion (Blue Note, 1966), recorded by Rudy Van Gelder and produced by Alfred Lion, with Henry Grimes on bass and Ed Blackwell on drums. He appears on the Jazz Composer's Orchestra's 1968 record, on Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, and on Carla Bley and Paul Haines's three-record jazz opera Escalator Over the Hill. He also cut a duo record, Hamba Khale!, with the South African pianist then recording as Dollar Brand, later Abdullah Ibrahim. From 1969 he ran a leader catalog on Bob Thiele's Flying Dutchman label: The Third World, Fenix, El Pampero live at Montreux, Under Fire, Bolivia with Lonnie Liston Smith, and El Gato.

Then he wrote a film score. Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris was released in 1972, and Barbieri's music for it won the Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition in 1973. The effect on his catalog is still visible in the databases: of the 926 credits Discogs lists under his name, only eighty are his own records, and a large share of the rest are other artists recording that one theme through 1972 and 1973, among them Andy Williams, Doc Severinsen, Ferrante & Teicher, Franck Pourcel, Andre Kostelanetz, Mongo Santamaria, Blue Mitchell, El Chicano, Chuck Mangione, and Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass.

He spent the leverage on going home. In April 1973 he recorded Chapter One: Latin America at Music Hall and S.A.C.I.S.I studios in Buenos Aires with a collective of Argentine musicians, with one track cut at Odeon Studios in Rio de Janeiro, produced by Ed Michel and released by Impulse! that October. Three more chapters followed inside two years: Chapter Two: Hasta Siempre and Chapter Three: Viva Emiliano Zapata in 1974, and the live Chapter Four: Alive in New York in 1975. Chapter Three shows how much room the label gave him, cut over two days at Generation Sound Studios in New York in June 1974 with Chico O'Farrill arranging and conducting, Ron Carter on bass, Grady Tate on drums, four percussionists and a horn section that included Randy Brecker and Howard Johnson on tuba.

In 1976 he signed to A&M, and Herb Alpert produced Caliente! (SP-4597). It reached No. 4 on the jazz chart and No. 75 pop, sold roughly 225,000 copies and became the best-selling record of his life. Its centrepiece is a bolero reading of "Europa (Earth's Cry Heaven's Smile)," written by Carlos Santana and Tom Coster. Three more A&M albums followed: Ruby, Ruby (1977), Tropico (1978) and Euphoria (1979). What did not change across the move was the sound. The enormous, rasping, barely-contained tenor tone he brought out of the free jazz years sits directly on top of arrangements built for radio, and that combination is what makes him the clearest case of crossover jazz there is.

The 1980s brought Bahia (Fania, 1982), Apasionado (1983) and Gato... Para Los Amigos!! (RCA, 1984). Then the work stopped. Michelle Barbieri, whom he married in 1960 and who managed his career, passed away from cancer in 1995 after ten years of treatment. Months later he had a heart attack and a triple bypass, and he did not record for roughly two years.

He came back in 1997 with Qué Pasa on Columbia, a record openly about her, and it reached No. 2 on Billboard's contemporary jazz chart. Che Corazón followed in 1999, its opening piece named "Cristiano" for the son born the year before, and The Shadow of the Cat in 2002. He kept performing into his seventies. In November 2015 the Latin Recording Academy gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award. He passed away in New York on April 2, 2016, of pneumonia, at 83.

He came up on Charlie Parker and was pushed forward by John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders, and the tone is the inheritance: a huge, rasping, overblown tenor sound with a great deal of air in it, closer to the free players than to any of his radio contemporaries. He never traded it for a smoother one.

What he added to that was his own continent. From The Third World in 1970 onward, the material is South American: tangos, milongas, chacareras, Brazilian songs, "Mi Buenos Aires Querido," "Cuando Vuelva A Tu Lado." The Impulse! chapters are the fullest version of that project, and they are arranged rather than merely played, with Chico O'Farrill writing for a full orchestra on Chapter Three.

The A&M records changed the setting and not the player. Herb Alpert put polished, melody-forward arrangements underneath him and Barbieri kept blowing the way he always had. That is the specific reason he belongs to crossover jazz rather than to smooth jazz: the commercial move is in the production, not in the playing.