Encyclopedia of Latin American Popular Music

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Encyclopedia of Latin American Popular Music Page 41

by George Torres


  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

  Mambo

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  233

  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

  Maracas

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  235

  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

  Mariachi

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  237

  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

 

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