Word: mambo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sights by bus or on muleback, royal teen-agers hacked around like any other kids, squirting each other with pop, staging impromptu Olympic games in ancient stadia and rewarding winners with stolen kisses. In the evening there were movies, and sometimes all hands joined to practice the mambo and the rumba, with Frederika easily carrying away top dancing honors. While the youngsters gulped gallons of Coca-Cola, their elders forsook champagne in favor of solider Scotch. At the end of one hilarious evening, some of the more enthusiastic princelings tossed their cousin Christian of Hanover into the ship...
Comes the Evolution. Such scenes can be found almost any night of the week across the U.S. But most people still feel like Pete Winters, and nobody is quite sure just what the mambo is. It combines the subtle trickery of the Latin with the simplicity of a society-band beat. It takes the basic pulse away from the percussion section and gives it to the saxes, and features a socking four-beat rhythm (often whacked out on a cowbell). Said one Boston onlooker: "It's more graceful than jitterbugging, but it's less inhibited...
According to one theory, mambo is an inevitable phase of cultural evolution, a resounding response to a major need Explains Darwin-minded Reporter Ed Wallace in the New York World-Telegram and Sun: "The rumba broke up the crowd of doleful listeners who had begun to accumulate like barnacles around the bandstand; it got people back on the dance floor.' The rumba came along just as dancers were becoming listeners. Then, when the kick of the rumba was beginning to wane, along came the mambo and eeuugghh! we're gone again...
...Mambo syncopations were ticking in Cuban Bandleader Prado's head as long ago as 1942. and he wrote them into arrangements for local bands. Six years later in Mexico, he formed his own band, and the mambo beat began to catch on. Prado's flair for the wild style-something like that of Stan Kenton's modernist crew -sold him with the jazz buffs and his insistent rhythm with the dancers...
...Mambo writhed its way through halt a dozen tropical and semitropical countries (Philippines President Ramon Magsaysay called it a "national calamity") before it seeped into the U.S. YANKS DIG THAT MAMBO BEAT, Variety's front page announced last June. It ran like quicksilver through the brassier ballrooms, and even rolled into such tony spots as Manhattan s Waldorf-Astoria...