Word: mambos
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...circled the globe during the mid-1990s. Why did it take so long to get a foothold in Cuba, the richly musical culture that gave the world rumba and mambo? "Hip-hop everywhere else has one reality. We have another," explains Ariel Fernandez, 24, a DJ, organizer of Alamar's annual summer rap festival and a central figure in Havana hip-hop. Fernandez couldn't be more right: Cuba's record industry is entirely government run, from the recording studios to the record stores. Which means that raperos, like bus drivers, hotel clerks and doctors and lawyers, work...
...MAMBO KING Raised in Spanish Harlem and trained at Juilliard, Tito Puente fronts his Latin jazz band for more than 50 years. His charismatic, flamboyant performances and masterly playing of the saxophone, congas, bongos and timbales earn him the nickname El Rey--the king--of mambo. Puente is instrumental in defining Latin jazz, and at the time of his death in 2000, he has five Grammys and 119 albums to his credit. He has inspired countless musicians...
...lapsed). In a six-year career, the 25-year-old Taiwanese seductress has made no less than 45 movies. One of her first, Sex and Zen II, is a soft-porn classic, the Emmanuel of Asia. Two of her films just debuted amid the incomparable glare of Cannes: Millennium Mambo and Beijing Rocks. Hong Kong singer-cine idol Leslie Cheung calls Shu Qi a "sex goddess." (And Cheung knows something about being adored by the crowd.) Chinese director Yonfan is even more gushing: "I think of Catherine Deneuve," he says. "A lady daring enough to do different roles...
...quite ready to do the victory dance, she may be the last skeptic. The woman whose face is known across Asia yet who still isn't quite a star is making it onto the A list. Millennium Mambo put Shu Qi under the tutelage of director Hou Hsiao-hsien, a serious cine-aficionado who almost single-handedly put Taiwanese art films on the global map. (The two plan to start work on another project later this year.) Mambo didn't unduly impress the critics or crowds at its opening at Cannes?everyone was hoping for a Crouching Tiger repeat...
...breakthrough finally came when Hou Hsiao-hsien cast her in Millennium Mambo as Vicky, a nightclub hostess torn between two men. Hou initially worried that Shu Qi wouldn't be daring enough, that she didn't have the artistic depth to push herself to explore the far range of emotional experiences. "My first impression was that she was completely overworked," says the director. "Hong Kong's film industry does not provide, like Hollywood, systematic help to provide a good acting environment to inspire professional works. A lot of actors and actresses in Taiwan and Hong Kong become weary...