CubaPLUS Magazine

Dámaso Pérez Prado, always king of the mambo

By: Cubaplus
Mar 29, 2021
Dámaso Pérez Prado, always king of the mambo

Even if, as some specialists affirm, Dámaso Pérez Prado was not the creator of the mambo, it is indisputable that it was he who brought it to the maximum of its splendor in the fifties of the twentieth century.

This great of the Cuban pentagram, despite the fact he lived most of his time in Mexico, he began his artistic career as an instrumentalist of the charanga of Senén Súrez in Matanzas, city in which he was born on December 11, 1917.

Already in 1940 he moved to Havana, where he worked as a pianist in famous cabaret orchestras until joining that of Paulina &Aálvarez, the greatest interpreter of the Cuban danzonete.

This passage of his through so many prestigious groups, among which Casino de la Playa stands out, allowed him to specialize in arrangements and drink at the fountains of what, some time later, would be his mambo, heir, like the cha-cha, of the danzón: national Cuban dance.

As early as 1946, Dámaso had told a journalist that he was working on a new musical style which he described as being the mambo. But almost at the same time, musicians like Arsenio Rodríguez and the López Brothers introduced the term mambo in their compositions.

According to Arsenio "the descendants of Congolese play a music called yuca drum and in the controversies of one and another singer form, following the rhythm I was inspired and that is the true basis of the mambo".

Some specialists point to Orestes López as the creator of the rhythm traditionally attributed to Pérez Prado. The truth is that, knowing that all those who used it, played together in nightclubs and downloads, the mambo may have been the result of a collective creation in which Bebo Valdés, the child Rivera and René Hernández cannot fail to be mentioned.

According to musicologist Leonardo Acosta, "the mambo was something that was in the environment" and this new rhythm had been cultivated by more than one musician.

Acosta affirms that Pérez Prado had the idea of creating something very different from its predecessors from the basic cells of the mambo, and he introduced the clusters of notes in Cuban music, just as Thelonius Monk did with jazz, and he took only the name from the danzon mambo.

Pérez Prado triumphed both in Mexico and the United States and his music toured the planet, and although he experimented with other rhythms, with none he achieved as much success as with the mambo, of which for Cuba and the world he is king.

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