Darwin & the Mambo

The Roseland State Ballroom in Bos ton's Back Bay, just down the street from Symphony Hall, was jumping last week.

It was jumping higher than Bostomans had seen in a long while. Cause: the mambo a dance named (some claim) from a slang word used by Cuban sugar cane workers meaning "shake it." The Boston crowd (1,140 Paid admissions) was shaking it with glee. So were the bright-sleeved musicians on the band stand and their round-faced, sleepy-eyed leader Perez Prado, self-confessed inventor of the mambo. In his dress suit and stiff shirt Prado never even blinked at the deafening brass screeches that threatened to shatter the red neon tubes framing the ceiling. Only 50-odd couples actually danced and of them only a hard core of eight couples were in full mambo frenzy. Easily the champs of the evening were a shapely blonde Boston housewife named Adele Winters and her dark-haired part ner They did dizzy mambo variations known as chases, double turns, rolls, shine breaks and triples with ripples.

At times the couple seemed to have been jolted by a high-voltage wire, hips writhing, arms swinging. Exhausted, Adele turned to light a cigarette, but the music shrieked louder, her partner yelled Come on!," and she stepped back into the beat as if she had never stopped.

On the sidelines stood her shirtsleeved young husband. Truck Driver Pete Win ters. "I've been trying to learn it, sighed, "but I can't seem to."

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. It can be adapted to any style. It's greater than the Charleston, greater than swing.

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.

Out Among the Grass Roots. The mambo beat is even invading the pop record field, where Vaughn Monroe They Were Doin' the Mambo is a solid hit. But Prado leads the field of authentic mamboists (others: Tito Rodriguez, Machito). This week, after his Boston triumph he goes on a tour of small New England towns to carry mambo to the grass roots.

Like most cults, the mambo has its purists who claim that the only real mambo is done in Latin America, and its liberals who argue that it can be done any old way as long as everyone is moving and happy. But as Darwin held, evolution never stands still. Species come and go The mambo has not even reached full growth but a mutation has already appeared,' mostly in Manhattan ballrooms. It is a Latin import called the Cha Cha Cha and it goes much like the mambo except that its step includes a light hop. Its devotees think it is a beast with a future.

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