Pianist, bandleader, composer, and arranger, Perez Prado was largely responsible for establishing and popularising the mambo in the 1950s and 1960s, and was among the first arrangers to introduce full orchestration (including strings) to Latin music.
He was born Damaso Perez Prado in Mantazas, Cuba, on December 11, 1916. By his mid-20s he had moved to Havana to pursue a musical career. While working as a pianist in clubs, cinemas, and casinos, Prado began to develop his own unique rhythmic ideas. Some of his arrangements were picked up by a famous Cuban band of the time, Orquesta Casino de la Playa, which hired Prado as pianist and arranger in 1943.
Around this time, Prado’s ideas began coalescing into mambo—an upbeat and brassy dance music in which horns and percussion provide punchy punctuation. Like the cha-cha-cha, the mambo was most likely a dance before it was a style of music; both the chachacha and mambo evolved from the traditional Cuban rumba. Perez sometimes claimed he heard the mambo emerging from the percussive cross-rhythms of five or six guitarists simultaneously jamming after hours in Cuban clubs.
Though Prado—and mambo—grew increasingly popular, he left Cuba in 1947—some biographers have suggested that Cuban music publishers considered him an upstart who dirtied their native rumba with forms like jazz, and so conspired to deny him work. Prado settled in Mexico City in 1948, and formed his own band. Through performing and recording for local labels, he gradually succeeded in becoming a multimedia sensation. He regularly performed at Mexico’s most chic clubs and served as musical director for a number of Mexican films, in some of which he appeared in a musical role.
The records Prado cut for RCA in late 1949, especially “Mambo No. 5” and “Que Rico El Mambo,” helped to ignite the firestorm of “mambo mania.” Prado’s music grew ever more popular, and began finding its way to pop stations throughout North and South America. The thousands of Cubans who had emigrated to the U.S. in the 1930s and 1940s to escape the Batista regime, and who settled in Spanish Harlem, also helped establish Prado’s New York City beachhead in the 1950s.
The mambo and Prado remained popular as he consistently recorded and toured throughout the 1950s. In 1955 he assumed the top pop spot with “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” which he first recorded in 1951. But the 1955 re-recording accompanied a wriggling Jane Russell in the film Underwater (in which Prado himself made a brief appearance), and it spent 26 weeks in the charts, including ten consecutive weeks as a U.S. No. 1.
Prado scored his second No. 1 hit in 1958 with his original “Patricia,” which Nino Rota chose as the theme for Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita in 2960. But by I960, rock’n’roll was overshadowing the mambo on pop radio and, in 1963, RCA stopped releasing Prado’s records in the U.S.
Prado returned to Mexico City in 1970 and remained popular in South America, continuing to tour and record. He recorded his final session in 1987. By that time his health was deteriorating, and he suffered a fatal stroke two years later, dying on September 13, 1989.
Perez Prado’s influential relationship with the mambo was similar to Elvis PRESLEY’S with rock’n’roll. He was almost certainly not the originator of the form (other candidates include Orestes Lopez, Antonio Arcano, and Arsenio Rodriguez, father of the conjunto), but he did more than anyone else to make mambo internationally popular.
Chris Slawecki
SEE ALSO:
CUBA; DANCE MUSIC; LATIN AMERICA.
FURTHER READING
Manuel, Peter, ed. Essays on Cuban Music (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
10 Grandes Exitos; Voodoo Suite/Exotic Suite.