Credited as the pioneer of the dynamic Afro-Cuban dance style known as mambo, Israel “Cachao” López was one of the most important and influential figures in 20th-century Cuban music. A virtuoso double-bass player with a thrilling ability to improvise, as well as an inventive composer, he began developing the mambo sound with his late brother Orestes “Macho” López in the late 1930s in Havana by speeding up and syncopating older and more stately Cuban dance styles.

By the 1950s mambo was exerting a significant influence on American jazz ,and in 1962, Cachao — the only name by which he was known in musical circles — moved to the United States. He lived there for the rest of his life and collaborated with most of the biggest US-based Latin music stars, including Tito Puente, Chico O’Farrill, Willie Colon, Celia Cruz, Eddie Palmieri and Gloria Estefan.

His career was the subject of a 1993 documentary film made by the Hollywood actor Andy Garcia. He also remained hugely popular and influential in his native Cuba, and his nephew, Orlando López, known as “Cachaito” (“little Cachao”) after his famous uncle, was the bass-player on the multimillion-selling album, Buena Vista Social Club.

Born in 1918, in Havana, the youngest of three children, Israel López was raised by a musical family. He later described the López house as resembling an instrument store rather than a home, and it is said that at one point there were 35 bassists in the extended López family circle.

He was classically taught and conservatoire-trained and by the age of 8 was playing bass in the orchestra pit of a Havana cinema, accompanying the silent films of the 1920s. There was no question of a professional instrument- maker constructing a custom-built, scaled-down stand-up bass so he stood on a wooden fruit crate to reach the upper neck.

By his teens he had graduated to the Havana Philharmonic Orchestra and worked under the baton of such visiting guest conductors as Herbert von Karajan, Igor Stravinsky and Heitor Villa-Lobos. He continued to play with the orchestra until he left Cuba in 1962 but it was only one aspect of his multifaceted musical personality, which also encompassed jazz and dance music.

Together with his brother, Orestes López, he wrote dozens of songs and played in various popular bands and groups. He could date his invention of the mambo musical style with some exactitude, to 1937, when he and his brother were improvising on a danzon tune, an elegant, slow dance. They came up with an added, speeded-up section with a distinctly more African feel and called it nuevo ritmo (new rhythm) or danzón mambo. Soon mambo became a style in its own right and subsequently led to the birth of modern salsa.

Cachao was at the heart of an equally significant development in Cuban music when in the late 1950s he presided over a series of late-night Havana sessions characterised by a free-flowing, jazzy and improvisational freedom. Known as descargas (“jam sessions”), the resulting recordings influenced other musicians in a range of styles from salsa to Latin jazz.

After the Cuban revolution in 1962 Cachao left Cuba, living briefly in Spain before settling in New York. There he became a fixture in jazz clubs such as the Palladium Ballroom and Birdland. He played in a band led by conga player, Cándido Camero, but also recorded prolifically under his own name.

In the 1970s he left New York for Las Vegas where he performed at casino shows and developed a gambling habit. “If you live in Las Vegas and gamble, you spend most of your time at the pawnshop,” he later noted after he had moved to Miami in the 1980s to escape his addiction. In Miami he lived quietly in the city’s large expatriate Cuban community, playing in small clubs and at weddings.

He returned to prominence after Andy Garcia’s 1993 film biography, Como su ritmo no hay dos (With a rhythm like no other). Garcia also had a hand in getting him back into the recording studio and the first of the resulting albums, Master Sessions, Volume One, in 1995 won him a Grammy award.

He won a further Grammy in 2005 for the album Ahora Si! and continued to perform until his death, playing concerts at the Hollywood Bowl and Carnegie Hall, New York, in 2006.

He is survived by a daughter, María Elena López.

Israel “Cachao” López, musician, was born on September 14, 1918. He died on March 22, 2008, aged 89