Encyclopedia of Latin American Popular Music
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Bauzá, a veteran of Chick Webb and Cab Calloway’s big bands, built on the innova-
tions of the conjuntos, combining the rhythms, formal structure, and percussion sec-
tion of son with the harmonic textures and instrumentation of swing bands to create
a distinct New York sound. This distinction was furthered by the lindy- influenced
dancing style developed by young Latinos at dance clubs like the Palladium
231
232 | Mambo
Mambo dancers at the Savoy Ballroom in the Harlem neighorhood of New York City in
1953. (AP/Wide World Photos)
Ballroom, which began featuring Latin music in 1947 and became the center of the
mambo culture in the early 1950s hosting the bands of Machito, Julliard-trained tim-
balero (see timbal ) and arranger Tito Puente, and singer Tito Rodríguez. The Palladium attracted a cross-section of New York’s multiethnic populations including
African Americans, Jews, Italians, and Irish in addition to Latinos as well as literary
and Hollywood elite, and jazz musicians playing at nearby clubs, such as Birdland.
What was now being called the mambo craze reached such levels that clubs like the
Savoy Ballroom and the Apollo Theater implemented mambo nights, and The Pal-
ladium began programming mambo exclusively beginning in 1952. That same year,
Arsenio Rodríguez moved to New York permanently. Recognizing that popularity
of mambo far exceeded that of the conjunto style that he was playing, he would begin
both insisting and lamenting that he had invented the genre.
While the Big Three—Machito, Puente, and Tito Rodríguez—were the genre’s
biggest names in New York, for much of the rest of the country, mambo became
nearly synonymous with Pérez Prado, who developed a separate and distinct vari-
ety of the genre and was also the first to use the term mambo . The Cuban-born pia-
nist Prado, who had begun his experimentations with mambo as early as 1942 while
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playing with the Orquesta Casino de la Playa, moved to Mexico in 1948 where he
made a series of records for RCA Victor with his own band beginning the follow-
ing year. These recordings included “Mambo No. 5,” “Que Rico El Mambo,” and
“Cerazo Rosa (Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom),” all of which became mainstream
hits in the United States. Prado’s success caused RCA Victor to switch his records
from its international catalog to its pop listing (the only Latino artist to receive this
distinction at the time) and led to his highly successful tour of the West Coast. As
a result of Prado’s tour, a number of American bands imitated Prado’s style, which
was typified by moderate tempos, sparse arrangements, saxophone ostinatos punc-
tuated by brash staccato brass interjections, and Prado’s own trademark grunts.
Although Prado’s style proved unpopular with New Yorkers and many Latino
audiences, critiqued by some as overly simplified, showy, and commercial, his band
produced several musicians who would become highly influential in Latin music,
including Mongo Santamaría, Johnny Pacheco, and Beny Moré, whose Banda Gi-
gante would borrow heavily from mambo. The mambo craze, which would hit its
peak in 1954, resulted in a number of mambo novelty songs recorded by non-Latino
Pérez Prado, Dámaso
Dámaso Pérez Prado (1916–1989) was a composer, music arranger and or-
chestrator, pianist, and director. His musical background was predominantly
folkloric and rumbero (see rumba). Although the originator of the mambo
may be debated (see also Arsenio Rodríguez), many believe that it was
Pérez Prado who synthesized, refi ned, and advanced mambo.
In 1944, Pérez Prado began to incorporate features of North American
music into Cuban rhythms and melodies. Later he moved to Mexico, and in
1949, he formed the group known as the Orquesta de Pérez Prado. There he
recorded his universally popular piece “Mambo no. 5,” which was followed by
“Qué rico el mambo” and “Mambo no. 8.”
Pérez Prado arrived in New York in 1952 for his época de oro (golden age),
a period of approximately 10 years, during which time he earned the title of
El rey del mambo (the mambo king). Among his numerous achievements were
his best-selling record Patricia, his composition Exotic Suite of the Americas, his
creation of dengue, and his work with eleven fi lms from the Mexican cinema as
an actor, musical arranger, and choreographer.
Further Reading
Sierra, Carlos J. Pérez Prado y el mambo. México: Ediciones de la Muralla, 1995.
Neris González
234 | Mambo
artists, such as Perry Como’s “Papa Loves Mambo,” Rosemary Clooney’s “Mambo
Italiano,” Ruth Brown’s “Mambo Baby,” and Bill Haley and The Comets’ “Mambo
Rock.” In addition, recordings by artists and groups specializing in exotica, such as
Yma Sumac and The Martin Denny Orchestra, as well as by serious jazz musicians,
such as Stan Kenton, George Shearing, and Cal Tjader, helped fuel the mainstream
clamor for mambo.
Another factor in the spread of mambo was the popularity of the TV series I
Love Lucy, which ran from 1951 to 1957 and was the highest rated show for four
of the six years of its run (and in the others ranked no lower than third). The run of
the series, which featured Cuban-born singer and bandleader Desi Arnáz playing a
caricaturized version of himself and occasionally included Arnáz singing with his
orchestra at his fictional Tropicana Club, coincided with mambo’s greatest years
of popularity. While Arnáz’s style owed more to his former mentor Xavier Cugat
than to the New York mambo orchestras, or even Prado and could not properly be
called mambo, the distinction was surely lost on the majority of viewers. The effect
of millions of Americans being exposed to Latin music and rhythms weekly cannot
be overlooked in providing a context in which mambo became more acceptable to
non-Latino audiences. By the late 1950s the mambo craze waned. It was supplanted
in popularity by—and according to some as a direct result of—both cha-cha-chá ,
a genre also adapted from danzón by Cuban charangas that featured slower, more danceable tempos and simpler rhythms relative to mambo, and by the rise of rock ‘n’
roll. In spite of its decline in popularity, mambo became a fixture in the professional
ballroom dance arena, and Puente and other bandleaders continued playing their
Latin jazz–informed style bearing whatever label was in vogue at any given moment.
Mambo experienced a resurgence of sorts beginning in the 1980s. Machito &
His Salsa Big Band won the Grammy Award for Best Latin Recording in 1983.
Despite the group’s name, its music was much closer stylistically to what Machito
had been playing 30 years previously than to music being produced at Fania Re-
cords, the New York-based label that gave birth to the term salsa in the late 1960s
and a driving force in the genre throughout the 1970s. Puente began enjoying
increased exposure in mainstream media beginning in the middle of the decade
and continuing into the 1990s, with appearances on TV shows such as The Cosby
Show, The Simpsons, Sesame Street, and Late Night with David Letterman and in
the 199
2 movie The Mambo Kings in which Puente has a cameo as himself at The
Palladium circa 1950. The movie spurred renewed interest in mambo and the art-
ists who had popularized it, resulting in a proliferation of reissues and repackag-
ing of material, many bestowing the title mambo king on everyone from Prado to
Puente to Arnáz. Also appearing in the wake of the film were a series of highly
acclaimed albums by Mario Bauzá, and by ¡Cubanísmo!, a Cuban mambo -tinged
group led by veteran trumpeter Jesús Alemañy, whose 1996 debut album featured
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two Arsenio Rodríguez compositions and another entitled “Homenaje a Arcaño.”
Mambo was also among the hodgepodge of musical genres and images serving
as representations of 1950s exotica and mainstream suburban chic reappropriated
as alternative urban kitsch for the retro lounge culture of the 1990s. The genre,
and especially Prado, experienced yet another brief surge in interest in the wake
of Lou Bega’s 2003 novelty hit “Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit Of),” based on the
Prado song of the same name.
Further Reading
Garcia, Davíd F. Arsenio Rodríguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular
Music. Philadephia: Temple University Press, 2006.
Loza, Steven. Tito Puente and the Making of Latin Music. Urbana and Chicago: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1999.
Roberts, John Storm. The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin Music on the United States,
2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Waxer, Lise. “Of Mambo Kings and Songs of Love: Dance Music in Havana and New
York from the 1930s to the 1950s.” Latin American Music Review (Revista de Música Lati-
noamericana) 15, no. 2 (1994): 139–76.
Ramón Versage Agudelo
Maracas
The maracas are a variety of Latin American handheld percussion instruments used
in both folk and popular music. Classified as idiophones they are a type of seed-
filled canister rattle with handles and are most commonly played in pairs. The in-
strument obtains its sound by being shaken from the handle, which sets the beads
inside of the canister in motion, striking the walls of the canister to give it its dis-
tinctive sound. Maracas are made from a variety of materials, with the handles
normally made of wood, while the canister may be made from materials such as
calabash, wood, shellacked rawhide, or plastic. The canister is filled either with
seeds or with plastic beads. The instrument is commonly shaken in the air with ac-
cents created by the forward and backward motion of the hands. They also may be
played against the performer’s body, which can help give another type of accent.
The instrument is a vital part of many Latin American musics, especially in the Ca-
ribbean, Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil, where it is played within the fabric of
an ensemble’s rhythm section. Famous performers include Machito, Ismael Rivera,
and Glen Velez. Maracas have been incorporated into Western art music as part of
the orchestral percussion battery, and they have been used frequently in European
and North American popular music as an auxiliary percussion instrument.
236 | Marcha
Further Reading
Uribe, Ed. The Essence of Afro-Cuban Percussion and Drum Set. New York: Warner
Brothers, 1996.
George Torres
Marcha
Marcha is the Spanish and Portuguese word for march, a musical genre that has
its origins in the music for military bands. European military bands brought to the
Americas were responsible for a military band culture that transplanted itself in
cities throughout all of Latin America. Military bands and municipal bands mod-
eled on the military type provided entertainment in the town squares on weekends
and selected holidays. As part of their repertoire, the bands would perform regional
marches associated and identified with a particular region. In Mexico, for example,
marches that are identified with a particular state are known and performed out-
side of the region, as in the Marcha de Zacatecas, one of Mexico’s most celebrated
marches. As a result of these pieces leaving the region and enjoying a transcultural
popularity, military marches became a mainstay of the banda repertoire. In Brazil, the march became an important genre in popular music. This incorporation of marcha eventually led to the formation of important hybrid forms in Brazil’s popular
music as in the mixture of the two genres, polka and marcha, which eventually
became the marcha-polka and then the frevo. The marcha carnavalesca is a Carnival song using a syncopated marcha rhythm. The marcha de bloco (also called
the frevo de bloco ) is a slower tempo marcha with moderately syncopated rhythms
in a minor key. The marcha de rancho with smoother rhythms than the traditional
marcha is another Carnival march with ironic texts and influenced by the older ran-
cho tradition, with “As pastorinhas” by Noel Rosa being a classic example.
Further Reading
Crook, Larry. Brazilian Music: Northeastern Traditions and the Heartbeat of a Modern
Nation . Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005.
George Torres
Mariachi
Mariachi is a traditional music originating from a wide region of western Mexico,
which includes the states of Jalisco, Nayarit, Colima, Aguascalientes, Zacatecas,
Sinaloa, Michoacán, Guanajuato, and Guerrero. The macro-regional manifestation
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Mariachi Vargas
Mariachi Vargas is a mariachi musical group founded in 1898 by Gaspar Var-
gas (1880–1969) in southern Jalisco. Now the prototype of modern mariachi, it
changed the rural music of Jalisco to the urban commercial style mariachi. From
1898 to 1930, Mariachi Vargas was a traditional mariachi consisting of four self-
taught musicians from Tecalitlán, who played chordophone instruments and a
repertoire consisting mainly of sones and some jarabes, valonas, songs, cor-
ridos, valses, and polkas.
Silvestre Vargas assumed the directorship in 1933, outfi tting seven regional
musicians with a rustic traje de charro. They incorporated the trumpet in 1940
and Ruben Fuentes joined in 1944; Fuentes became codirector and initiated a
modernization process of learned musical technique.
From 1954 to 1975, Mariachi Vargas took the form of the modern mariachi to
interpret a new repertoire with arrangements of huapangos, rancheras, bole-
ros, and valses. Jesus Rodriguez joined as codirector in 1955, experimenting with rhythmic combinations and complex harmonies for baladas. Since 1975, Mariachi
Vargas has become a spectacular mariachi of 12 talented musicians and begun to
perform medley pieces that showcase different regions of Mexico and the world.
Further Reading
Jáuregui, Jesús. “De la comarca a la fama mundial.” In El Mariachi. Símbolo musi-
cal de México, 320–51. México: Taurus, 2007.
J. Jesús Jáuregui Jimenez
of mariachi was formed through a long process that combined indigenous cul-
tural elements with those brought over from Mediterranean Europe and from sub-
Saharan Africa, which resulted in a unique mixture, within which local variations
with different instrumental personne
l, performance, and singing practices, as well
as special features regarding lyrics and how to dance.
The traditional mariachi was linked to festive and ritual life of rural communi-
ties, played generally by stringed instruments and had a reduced number of players:
at least two but not more than five. It was a variant of an ensemble from New Spain
and America consisting of harp, violin (rabel), and vihuela , and its manifestation corresponds to an oral tradition, which did not base its transmission on systems of
written notation, so its musical and textual tradition now constitutes a marginalized
collective heritage, still seen in remote populations of western Mexico, particularly
where the Huichol, Cora, and mountain mestizos live.
238 | Mariachi
Today the term mariachi refers to a musical ensemble, but in the 19th century
it was used to refer to a popular open-air festival ( fandango ), the group of musi-
cians, the songs that they performed, the platform on which the dancers performed
zapateado, and to various ranches in the Nayarit-Sinaloa region. The etymology of
the word is unknown, although the historical-linguistic analysis supports an indig-
enous origin in various languages of the Yutoazteca family, and has been traced
back to 1832 to a toponymy reference for the name of a ranch called mariachi/che
in Santiago Ixcuintla, Nayarit, rejecting the possible association with the French
term for marriage ( mariage ).
Since the end of the 18th century, the son and the jarabe constituted the principal genres of the mariachi tradition in the secular sphere, while the minuet was the
typical musical prayer for religious occasions. The corrido was the epic genre par
excellence, and during the 19th century incorporated in its repertoire were valses ,
polkas, chotes (see schottische ), mazurkas, jotas, and costillas. Those mariachis eventually included some aerophone instruments, like the transverse flute, but
with the arrival of the military bands that spread throughout all of Mexico, and mu-
nicipal wind bands at the end of the 19th century, mariachi groups appeared that
included valve aerophones as an added instrument, which did not alter the chordo-
phone balance of the group.
In the year 1907, for the first time, a mariachi orchestra from Jalisco wore the