The Mambo

A new dance craze was sweeping the hemisphere. Part rumba and part jive, with a strong dash of itching powder, the mambo had left unstormed only the tango strongholds of Argentina and the samba-land of Brazil. In all the other Americas, dancers quivered and kicked--sedately in swank nightclubs and wildly in smoky dives--to the mambo beat. This week its originator, Damaso Perez Prado, 29, was scheduled to arrive in New York to carry the assault to the U.S.

The mambo's relentless rhythm had already caused at least one homicide (in Mexico), had driven its practitioners to such wild exuberance in Peru that Cardinal Juan Gualberto Guevara of Lima denied absolution to anyone who danced it. In its fast, Afro-Cuban syncopation, the percussion instruments thump down on the offbeat while the brasses go up in high blaring dissonance. Its tunes have such titles as Mambo No. 5, El Ruletero (the taxi driver) and Pachito 'Eche, whose words in typical rhythm, go: "Who is it, who is it? I will not say it. Who is it? Who is it? I will have to say it. Who is it, who is it? I will not say it. Pachito 'Eche's the name of this senor."

Though mambo has a number of self-styled kings & queens (one of whom, Mexico's flame-haired Maria Antonieta Pons, was already pulling them into a midtown New York nightclub last week), Perez Prado is its emperor. Discussing his creation, Perez Prado explains: "I am a collector of cries and noises, elemental ones like seagulls on the shore, winds through the trees, men at work in a foundry. Mambo is a movement back to nature, by means of rhythms based on such cries and noises, and on simple joys."

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