Pianist, composer, arranger, bandleader and producer Larry Harlow is an essential figure in the development of salsa. As it turns out, he is also the most inspired challenger of its conventions. Finally, the times are catching up with his artistic ambition.

La Raza Latina: A Salsa Suite, arguably Harlow’s masterpiece, will be performed live at the Adrienne Arsht Center on Friday for only the second time since its recording in 1977. (It was premiered at Lincoln Center in August 2010.)

Written as a four-part suite for large ensemble including singers, brass, percussion and strings, La Raza Latina traces the evolution of Afro-Cuban music from its roots in Africa to Cuba, New York City and beyond.

For the Miami concert, Harlow has assembled an impressive 45-piece ensemble featuring singer Adonis Puentes, violinists Alfredo de la Fe and Federico Brito, percussionists Candido, Chembo Corniel, Richie Flores and Bobby Sanabria and the Mario Ortiz All-Star Band.

“I am not just a street salsa musician,” says Harlow, 72, with a sly smile in an interview at his Miami Beach home. “I’m well educated. I studied arranging and composition and come from a whole line of musicians, so to me, writing a salsa song, I can do that any day of the week. Let’s do something on a larger scale.”

And that he did — more than once.

By the mid 1970s, salsa had gone from the streets to the clubs to a massive sold-out show at Yankee Stadium in barely a decade. It had a flagship label, Fania Records, Latin music’s answer to Motown and Blue Note, and had inspired a documentary, Our Latin Thing, re-released last year.

Its commercial success established, salsa was ripe for artistic audacity. Harlow, who had produced countless hits for various artists as Fania’s chief producer and done dozens of albums as a bandleader, had the credentials, imagination and means for it.

In 1973, he wrote and produced Hommy, A Latin Opera, a response to The Who’s Tommy, and put salsa in Carnegie Hall.

“I love big band, big concerts, the symphony,” says Harlow, who discovered Latin music as a Jewish kid from Brooklyn in the sounds pouring from windows and storefronts as he walked from the subway exit to the High School of Music and Arts in Harlem.

“I studied conducting and I love that stuff. When I conducted Hommy at Carnegie Hall with a 60-piece orchestra, with the first note, the first downbeat, every hair in my body stood up. It was amazing, and I thought, ‘I need to do this again.’ ”

Four years later, Harlow raised the ante again with La Raza Latina. Built around songs with connecting interludes, Hommy had followed some conventions, but “there are no songs in La Raza Latina,” Harlow says, breaking into laugh.

The suite, arranged by Harlow, Luis “Perico” Ortiz and Marty Sheller, plays as a continuous piece of music.

The first movement, setting the theme, is the closest to a conventional salsa song. But the piece moves quickly to tell its story in music. It first alludes to a bembé (a celebration of the spirits in Afro-Cuban religion), and smoothly goes on to evoke Cuban music styles including rumba, son, danzón and cha cha cha.

As the story unfolds, the arrangement showcases the various ensembles in Afro-Latin music and their distinct sounds, from the conjunto and the big band to the modern (for the late ’70s) group.

The movement titled New York 1950s & 1960s nods to the Tito Puente Orchestra, while the closing section, Futuro (Future), draws heavily on the sound of the Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna, a potent, forward-looking Havana ensemble that at one time included Chucho Valdés, Paquito D’Rivera, Arturo Sandoval and the late Juan Pablo Torres. It became the incubator of the fusion group Irakere.

Remarkably, there wasn’t any plan at the time for making La Raza Latina another dance music hit or a concert piece, Harlow says.

“It really was nothing,” he says with a shrug. “And it was never a hit because there were no songs on it. Jerry [Masucci, a Fania Records founder] never pulled a single of it and said ‘Let’s play this song.’ For him, it was just one of the 12 albums I had signed to do for Fania. But it turned into a great thing.”