Word: mambo
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...beach party in Spain or tune into Belgian radio, and you're likely to hear one word: "Chihuahua!" This is not a forlorn pet owner summoning his tiny, unimaginatively named dog. It is the sound of marketing, the remix of an old mambo song that has gone from TV spot to hit single and the word on millions of lips. And it's all brought to you by Coca-Cola - not that you'd know from listening to the song. In a cluttered marketplace, advertisers need to be different. Traditional ads repeating a brand name 30 times in 30 seconds...
...where her career flourished. Her contralto voice was like the waters that separate Miami and Havana--inviting, sun-kissed, capable of rising up in a storm. Cruz sang with everybody who was anybody in Latin music--fronting Johnny Pacheco's band, appearing with Tito Puente in the movie The Mambo Kings--and many future somebodies were listening. Marc Anthony, Jennifer Lopez, Ruben Blades and La India acknowledged her influence. Known as the Queen of Salsa, she once said, "Salsa is ... all the Cuban rhythms under one name." You could say the same about Cruz. --By Christopher John Farley
...life, and he's developed into a free player. He breaks away from patterns and styles in ways that other Cubans don't. That suits the electric guitar really well, and it also allowed us as collaborators to kind of meet in the middle, 'cause I'm not Cuban." Mambo Sinuendo has moments where it sounds like the sound track to a particularly cool Havana nightclub, but the two players achieve a dynamic so loose and easy that they also float over Africa, Mexico, Hawaii and Birdland, incorporating whatever style catches their ears...
That freedom belies the geopolitical and logistical circumstances under which Mambo was recorded. Cooder and Galban, 72, tried to create a lifetime's worth of musical repartee in pressure-packed 10-hour recording sessions. (During his exemption, Cooder also produced an album by Buena Vista vocalist Ibrahim Ferrer, Buenos Hermanos, due out in March.) "Because every minute counts," says Cooder, "you pretty much just keep the tape running." The continual recording paid off when Galban walked into the studio one day, sat down at the piano and played Bolero Sonambulo, Mambo's best track, fully formed. "You knew right away...
Cooder faces imprisonment by the U.S. government if he returns to Cuba, which means Mambo and the Ferrer album are the end of his Cuban excursions. "It's totally impossible for me to go back until some comprehensive change occurs in the embargo," says Cooder. "The sad thing is, these players are indispensable, and none of them are getting younger...