Mambo

The mambo is a genre of Cuban dance music started by the charanga Arcaño y sus Maravillas in the late 1930s and later popularized in the big band style by Pérez Prado. It originated as a syncopated form of danzón, known as danzón-mambo, with an improvised final section, incorporating the typical Cuban son guajeos (also known as montunos). These guajeos became the essence of the genre when it was performed by big bands, which did not perform the traditional sections of the danzón and instead leaned towards swing and jazz. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, the mambo had become a "dance craze" in the United States, as its associated dance took over the East Coast thanks to Pérez Prado, Tito Puente, Tito Rodríguez and others. In the mid-1950s, a slower ballroom dance style, also derived from danzón, cha-cha-cha, replaced the mambo as the most popular dance genre in North America. However, the mambo continued to enjoy a certain degree of popularity in the 1960s and new derivative styles appeared, such as dengue; by the 1970s it had been largely incorporated into salsa..

Mambo arrived in 1947 and mambo music and dance became popular soon. Recording companies began to use mambo to label their records and advertisements for mambo dance lessons were in local newspapers. New York City had made mambo a transnational popular cultural phenomenon. In New York the mambo was played in a high-strung, sophisticated way that had the Palladium Ballroom, the famous Broadway dance-hall, jumping. The Ballroom soon proclaimed itself the "temple of mambo", for the city's best dancers—the Mambo Aces, "Killer Joe" Piro, Augie and Margo Rodriguez. Augie and Margo were still dancing 50 years later (2006) in Las Vegas. Some of New York's biggest mambo dancers and bands of the 1950s included: Augie & Margo, Michael Terrace & Elita, Carmen Cruz & Gene Ortiz, Larry Selon & Vera Rodríguez, Mambo Aces(Anibal Vasquez and Samson Batalla), Killer Joe Piro, Paulito and Lilon, Louie Maquina, Pedro Aguilar ("Cuban Pete"), Machito, Tito Rodríguez, Jose Curbelo, Akohh, and Noro Morales

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mambo_(music)