Born into a family of musicians Larry Harlow probably was destined for a music career, but it was his walks to class at the High School of Music and Art in Upper Manhattan that put him onto his lifelong passion.

“When I got out of the subway, I would walk up this huge hill and hear this strange music coming from all the bodegas,” he told The Forward in 2006. “I thought, ‘What kind of music is this?’”

What he was hearing was early recordings by Tito Puente and other energetic new Latin sounds. Soon Mr. Harlow, a Brooklyn-born Jew, was fusing those and other influences into a career as a major figure in salsa, as a pianist, bandleader, songwriter and producer.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, onstage and in the production studios of Fania Records, he would help define salsa and spread it throughout the United States and around the world. He was affectionately known in the Latin music world as “El Judio Maravillosol” the marvelous Jew.

Mr. Harlow died August 20 at a care center in the Bronx. He was 82.