Paquito D'Rivera was born June 4, 1948, in Havana, Cuba, and was already performing with the National Theater Orchestra at ten. He studied at the Havana Conservatory of Music and became a featured soloist with the Cuban National Symphony at seventeen, the same year he co-founded the Cuban Modern Music Orchestra, which he went on to conduct for two years. He was also one of the founders, alongside Chucho and Oscar Valdés, of Irakere, the band whose explosive mix of jazz, rock, classical, and traditional Cuban music had never been heard in that combination before. Irakere toured extensively through the Americas and Europe, picked up Grammy nominations in 1979 and 1980, and won a Grammy in 1979.

D'Rivera defected from Cuba and built a substantial American solo career, eventually amassing a combined 16 Grammy and Latin Grammy Awards, five Grammys and eleven Latin Grammys, with his first solo Grammy recognition coming in 1996 for Portraits of Cuba. He was named a 2005 NEA Jazz Master, received the National Medal of the Arts that same year, and was honored with the Living Jazz Legend Award at the Kennedy Center in 2007. Bassist Massimo Biolcati, already profiled on this site, toured with D'Rivera early in his own career; see Massimo Biolcati's profile.

D'Rivera's playing bridges Afro-Cuban rhythmic tradition, European classical training, and American jazz improvisation, a genuinely tri-continental musical vocabulary shaped first by Irakere's genre-blending ambitions in Cuba and then by decades of American Latin jazz collaboration after his defection.