The mambo dance originated in Cuba in the early 1940’s, a product of Cuba’s popular danzon heavily infused with African rhythms and steps. Mambo dance was created as a counterpart to mambo music which also originated in Cuba approximately six to eight years before the dance was introduced.
Besides its definitions as dance and music, the World English Dictionary defines “mambo” as a Haitian voodoo priestess. Uncited sources on Wikipedia and Essortment also say the word means “conversation with the gods” in Kikongo, a language spoke by Central African slaves who were taken to Cuba, as well as also being a bantu drum. Whatever the origins of the word may be, the music and dance originated in Cuba and set off a dance craze that would spawn the closely-related chachacha and salsa, as well as the “Latin hustle” of the 1970’s.
Mambo music was invented in 1937 or 1938 by Orestes Lopez. It was devised as the final section of a danzon arrangement. The trend of using this new ending was continued by Arcano y sus Maravillas.
The original danzon was a blend of the contradanza (from the European contredanse) and African rhythms and steps. In the 1850’s Havana’s daily paper, El Triunfo, and travelers described the earliest form of the dance as something like a wreath dance. Black Cubans would hold the ends of colored ribbons, dancing and entwining the ribbons into elaborate patterns.
By the early 1880’s danzon was adopted by orchestras and couples throughout the island nation. It was considered quite scandalous at first due to the close proximity of the dancer’s bodies and the slow rhythm. By the turn of the century the danzon was known as the official dance of Cuba.
In 1943, Perez Prado created a dance for Lopez’s mambo music. The dance very quickly became popular in Cuba. When Prado moved to Mexico City, he took his music with him, popularizing mambo in Mexico. Prado wrote several mambos and gave live presentations of the music accompanied by dancers who would become accomplished in mambo as well as several other forms of dance.
The dance was introduced in ballrooms in New York City in 1947. Mambo craze took the city by storm, spreading like wildfire to other cities such as Miami and San Francisco. Ballrooms and night clubs filled with “mambonicks”, and dance instructors kept busy teaching the new dance steps. In the Musical Quarterly (2006), David Garcia says the mambo was described as “feeling the music”. Though it’s true that all Latin music thrives on the Latinos ability to quickly pick up and “feel” the music’s rhythm, the mambo has evolved into a very precise dance with complicated and measured movements. During its early days in the United States, dance instructors determined the dance was too energetic for their clientele and a more measured approach to the dance caused it to evolve into the dance we know today as the mambo. As the dance continued to be modified to fit a new culture, different subgenres emerged, known today as the cha-cha and salsa.
Mambo, in its earliest form, was a bit of a free form dance, with a quick pace and lavish movements of the arms. It was then, as it is today, dance in 4/4 time. The modern version of mambo remains a popular ballroom dance though in the night clubs salsa has overtaken mambo’s popularity.
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