Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub

by Rosa Lowinger

At the time, the most popular of the new rhythms was mambo—a music and dance style with rapid-fire syncopation and jazz-fueled improvisation. The word mambo comes from the Bantu African dialect. Arsenio Rodríguez, one of the early founders of the genre, whose grandfather was a slave from the Congo, claimed that the word came from the phrase, abre cuto güirí mambo, which means “open your ears and listen up.” “It’s hard to give a precise definition for the mambo,” writes musicologist Ned Sublette. “It can be instrumental or vocal. It’s an up-tempo, horn-driven music, but there are slower mambos. It’s big band music, but you can play it with a combo if you must. It was the biggest musical craze in the United States in the days immediately preceding rock-and-roll, peaking around 1953, and it has been fabulously recycled as nostalgia.”