Ernesto Antonio Puente was born on 20th April 1923, in Manhattan, New York City USA, and was a musician, song writer as well as record producer. He was a very popular and prolific Puerto Rican musician, who recorded more than 100 albums of Latin music, and is still nicknamed The King of Latin Music. Puente won his first Grammy Award in 1979 for the album “A Tribute to Beny Moré”, and subsequently received a total of five Grammys, the latest of which came in 2000 from the album “Mambo Birdland”. He was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003. Puente had been active in the entertainment industry from 1946 to 2000, when he passed away.
How much is the net worth of Tito Puente? It has been calculated by authoritative sources that the overall size of his net worth is as much as $5 million, as of the data presented in the middle of 2017. Music was the main source of Puente’s modest fortune.
Tito Puente Net Worth $5 Million
To begin with, from an early age he was interested in percussion, and at the age of 13 he played as a drummer in Ramon Olivero’s big band, before studying composition, orchestration and piano at the Juilliard School of Music. From his childhood he learned to dance, and dance became a major axis of his musical career.
Puente began his full-time career playing with the Cuban pianist José Curbelo, then with Johnny Rodríguez, Anselmo Sacassas and Noro Morales. In 1942, he played with Machito and then went to serve in the US Navy during World War II. In 1945, he returned to New York and worked with José Curbello, Fernando Alvarez, Charlie Palmieri and Pupi Campo. Then, he formed the orchestra Piccadilly Boys, with which he released several albums. In 1949, he began to play the vibraphone too, followed by the congas, piano and occasionally clarinet as well as saxophone. During the 1950s, he played mambo almost every night at the Palladium Ballroom in New York, a meeting place of American stars, all of which laid the base of his net worth.
He was the only non-Cuban artist to be invited to Cuba in 1952 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Cuban music. In 1956, he turned to jazz with the album “Puente Goes Jazz”, and then to the bossa nova during the 1960s. However, Tito recorded dozens of albums touching many different styles, and especially salsa in the 1980s. He also played with the greatest jazz musicians, from Miles Davis to Lionel Hampton, from Dizzy Gillespie to Dexter Gordon. In 1962, he composed “Oye Como Va” which was a huge success in 1970s, thanks to the cover of Carlos Santana. In the late 1970s, he joined the Latin Percussion Jazz Ensemble with which he recorded two albums, and went on tour in Europe and Japan. In the 1980s, he moved towards instrumental music and jazz, and among others worked with pianists Jorge Dalto and Sonny Bravo as well as percussionists Dandy Rodríguez and José Madera.
He was also an actor in the second half of his life, to give example, starring in the feature film “The Mambo Kings”, which was shot in 1992. In the 1980s, he appeared several times on TV in the “Cosby Show”. In 1995, he also made a guest appearance in the animated series “The Simpsons”.
Finally, in the personal life of Tito Puente, he was married to Margaret Asencio from 1963, and they had two children together. He died of a heart attack on 1st June 2000 in New York City.
