After a six-year hiatus, band leader and composer Juan de Marcos González will be back in town tonight with the Afro-Cuban All Stars. These artists promise to make an exuberant night of it, with a little help from New York’s Latin music fans. Regulations notwithstanding, dancing in the aisles is a distinct possibility.

In America de Marcos is best known as the driving force behind the Grammy-winning album, Buena Vista Social Club, produced by Ry Cooder in 1997.  In fact, de Marcos directed the famous concert at Carnegie Hall, immortalized in Wim Wenders’s movie of the same name.

But in Cuba de Marcos was famous long before that as the leader of Sierra Maestra, a band dedicated to reviving traditional-style son music. Before the Buena Vista Social Club project, the band had cut 15 albums and toured the world, and de Marcos had just started a new group, the Afro-Cuban All Stars. In the aftermath of the film and album’s success, he took his new group on an international tour.

De Marcos’ work on all these projects helped bring Afro-Cuban music to a new generation of Americans during the 1990s. But in 2002 the Bush administration slammed the door on the continuing cultural exchange between de Marcos’ homeland and the United States by denying visas to Cuban artists. De Marcos and many of his country’s greatest musicians were forced to cancel their American bookings.

“Mr. Bush stopped the exchange,” de Marcos tells me, “because the extreme right wing Cubans in Miami lobbied him.”

As things stand now, the Obama folks still haven’t lifted the blockade. But de Marcos has figured a way around it.  The 15 world-renowned musicians currently touring the United States as the Afro-Cuban All Stars are all Cuban expats, living abroad in countries as various as Canada, Mexico, Ireland, Germany, Spain and Sweden. As such, they have dual passports and can avoid visa problems. Their Manhattan performance is part of a 35-city U.S. tour this spring.

“We’re the first Cuban band to play in the United States in six years,” says de Marcos. “We’re going to be the pioneers to open the doors.”

If you love rhythm, you know Cubans are some of its greatest masters. The conga, rumba, son, mambo and cha-cha-chá—are all rhythmic forms that hail from that same Caribbean island-country, off the coast of Florida.  It’s a musical tradition that came into being as a result of the slave trade. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, European slave traders kidnapped more than 600,000 West Africans and forced them to work in Cuba’s cane fields and sugar mills. Slavery brought death and misery to hundreds of thousands of people. It also brought a rich new music to the Americas. In Cuba, African and Spanish cultures intermixed, just as the people did. This gave birth to many of the musical forms that make up Latin music and jazz.

De Marcos grew up in a musical family living in the Pueblo Nuevo neighborhood of Havana. His father, Marcos González Mauriz, was a rumba singer, and through him young Juan was steeped in popular Afro-Cuban music. At the age of nine, he began studying classical music at a conservatory, where he learned about harmony, counterpoint, and the voices of fugues.

“In Cuban conservatories, the instruction is absolutely classical,” de Marcos explains. “The system is Russian, and everybody gets a symphonic background.  It’s kind of like Julliard.”

So de Marcos actually grew up in two musical traditions at the same time. He played classical guitar but also the tres, a Cuban folk guitar with three pairs of strings.  When he composes for the Afro-Cuban All Stars today, he thinks in terms of orchestration but also improvisation.

“I leave a lot of holes in my composition—space for the musicians to improvise and show their talent,” he says.

Tonight at Town Hall, de Marcos promises some traditional standards, along with songs from his group’s upcoming album, Breaking the Rules, and several of its previous ones. One song they’ll probably to do is “Addimu a Chango,” from their 2005 album Step Forward.  Although dedicated to Chango, the god of thunder in the Santaría religion, the number has a funky, racy feeling like secular party music, and it veers off into a jazzy end.

De Marcos also plans to perform a danzón (a traditional Cuban dance with European musical roots) dedicated to his wife, Gliceria Abreu, who will be on stage. “It’s a danzón, but with contemporary elements,” de Marcos explains. “It moves into cha-cha-chá, then guajira [a form of Cuban country music], then back into danzón again.”

Like Cuba itself, the music of de Marcos and the Afro-Cuban All Stars is a mélange of colors, textures and influences that melt into each other like the flavors of a good stew.  Just when you think you’ve got the recipe nailed, it turns out to be something else.

“It’s music you can sit and listen to…but at the same time it’s very danceable,” asserts de Marcos. “I certainly hope people will be moving their hips.”

In New York, I’d take that as a sure-fire prediction. If you’re planning to go, put on your sequined skirt!