Transit workers, bank executives, seamstresses and professionals-all dressed to the nines-shattered racial, ethnic and class barriers as they moved their hips to pulsating drums and blasting trumpets.

His band was the headline act in 1947 at the inaugural Latin night at The Palladium Ballroom, located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which would soon be hailed as 'the home of the mambo.' Police closed streets around the club to handle hundreds of fans, many dancing in line while waiting to get in. Jazz in the top and the Afro-Cuban rhythm at the bottom.”

And the rhythms that produces the music we play is African,” Bauzá explained in “Latin Music USA.” “You ever hear the expression lemon meringue pie? That’s exactly what this is. That sound, says longtime musician and educator Bobby Sanabria, was the first time a big band used a trio of drums from Cuba to drive an Afro-Cuban beat: the bongos created by creoles the timbales derived from the timpani (or kettle drums) in Europe and the congas, a newcomer to popular music with the most direct connection to West Africa’s rhythms and culture.Īnd long before it became culturally popular to embrace African roots, the band’s name purposely made a point. He later recruited his brother-in-law, Francisco Gutiérrez Grillo, to be Machito, the singer and front man of the new band with the unique Latin sound. After settling there in the 1930s, he was soon playing trumpet and arranging tunes for big band jazz ensembles under leaders like Chick Webb and Cab Calloway. Mario Bauzá, the band’s Cuban-born founder and musical director, had been drawn to the freedom and energy of Harlem. Mambo’s most popular early ambassadors in New York were Machito and his Afro-Cubans, a band that hit the city’s music scene in the 1940s and revolutionized mambo.

Salsa evolved from mambo, which itself had origins in son, an up-tempo urban folk music from eastern Cuba that evolved as it made its way to Havana and then to the clubs and streets of New York City. Sort Of In New York, Mambo Fuses With Big Band Jazz Here's Why Puerto Rico Is Part of the U.S.

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