Are mambo and salsa the same type of music? If not, what is there difference? Cu

Question:I'm just really curious. Plus, well, I'm not an author or anything but I'm working on a story that involves dancing and I need to know the difference between mambo and salsa because to me they seem the same.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: I'm just really curious. Plus, well, I'm not an author or anything but I'm working on a story that involves dancing and I need to know the difference between mambo and salsa because to me they seem the same.

Todays Salsa dancing is a direct descendant of Mambo. Mambo originated in Cuba in the late 1940s, and had a brief run as a super-popular fad in North America during the 1950s (specially 1954). At the end of the 1950s, a slowed down and syncopated version of Mambo -- the Cha-Cha (originally called Triple Mambo) -- usurped Mambo's popularity. Then suddenly, in 1961, everyone in North America started doing the Twist, and partner dancing, including Latin partner dancing, fell completely out of fashion for about 15 years. In the mid-1970s, the Disco craze created a resurgent interest in partner dancing, and Mambo was revived in the New York Latin dance communities under the new name Salsa. The new dance was primarily Mambo, with noticeable influences and borrowings from Disco/Hustle (which was itself primarily a slicked-up and polyesterized verion of Swing). The new Salsa form of Mambo spread throughout Latin America and became the universal Latin club dance, with occasional modest regional differences.

I hope this helps you. If you want, purchase some old Mambo music and dance to it. Then play some new salsa and dance to that. I'm sure you will notice the difference. Also remember one thing that is really important, if you have taken lessons from a dance instructor whether male or female, young or old, Latino or other, remember that none of them would ever attempt to go to Cuba or Puerto Rico, etc. and teach the natives how to dance their own music. Alot of what is taught today is all modern. Such as the so called Suzie Q. On the mother Island of PR we tend to find it amusing. Good Luck and keep dancing!!!!!!!!!!!!! Update: The mambo is a very popular and sensual dance, with African and Cuban rhythms. But how did it get its start? How is it danced today? Read this article for a history and overview of the mambo.

Mambo is actually a name for a bantu drum. The word "mambo" means "conversation with the Gods," and these drums were used for sacred and ritual purposes. The mambo is a spinoff of the English country dance, which made its way to Cuba through immigrants. It was named the danza, or the dance of Cuba, and gradually its beat and movement became saturated with African and Cuban rhythms, creating an entirely new beat and style.

Mambo's origin lies in the early 1900's in Cuba. Oresta Lopez, a composer and cellist, created a piece known as the "mambo" mixing everyday Cuban rhythms with the African and south American aspects on the street. The result was a new fusion, and one that supported a continuous beat. Mambo became ever more popular when Prado Perez, a famous bandleader and a friend to Lopez, marketed his music under the name "mambo." It contained big brass and drum sound, and incorporated fast beats and runs on the instruments. In 1951, Perez Prado and his Orchestra took a tour of the United States, establishing Perez as a mambo king and mambo's as America's latest craze. Perez was actually the first to market the "Mambo #5," now popular again in the 1990's! Dancing houses and clubs began to improvise steps to the beat created, and the mambo was born.

This popularity spread to the United Stated very rapidly. It was actually not the first Cuban-African dance to achieve popularity in the United Stated. The rumba was introduced in the 1930's to the American public, and it took on like wildfire. During the mid-1900's, people danced up a mambo storm in Miami, New York and San Fransisco. The mambo was especially popular in New York dance halls, where dancers twisted and turned and threw their partners, arms, legs and hands in the air to win dance competitions. Mambo bands developed intense rivalries as to who could create the best mambo rhythm. Players like Ellington, Gillespie and Bob Hope were all part of this friendly competition.

Mambo is written to music in 4/4 time, but some of these beats call for the partner to hold. The first step on every 4/4 beat has no movement, followed by quick-quick-slow beats. Mambo is characterized by the hip movements that it entails. While moving forward and backwards to the beat, dancers "sway" with the hips, creating a fluid motion that flows with the music. The mambo can exist in different forms. One form, the triple mambo, is so fast that the beat is accelerated to three times its normal rate. Out of this fast-stepping dance came another genre, the cha-cha. What many people do not know is that the cha-cha is actually still a form of the mambo. It's music and beat structure make it a surefire relation.

Modern mambo is considered a New York creation. The fluidity of the dance entered the mambo scene shortly after its emergence into New York. The five note, two bar rhythm pattern known as the clave was the backbone of the dance, and from this New Yorkers like Lenny Dale, Cuban Pete and Killer Joe Piro added steps from jazz, tap and swing. By the mid 1970's, the hustle also became a favorite dance form in New York, and Latin moves were added to create the "Latin hustle." This dance form was the rage in the late 1970's, encompassing mambo with quicker rhythms and steps.

CUBAN ORIGINS

Cuba established its identity by combining the influences of its entire population -- white, black,
and mulatto. Music played an important role in the formation of such an identity. The genre that
was to succeed in creatively fusing equal amounts of white- and black- derived musical features
was the son, which subsequently came to dominate the culture not only in Cuba, but most of the
Spanish-speaking Caribbean as well.

The son originated in eastern Cuba during the first decades of the century. From the start it
represented a mixture of Spanish-derived and Afro-Cuban elements. The basic two-part formal of the son has remained the same from the 1920s to the present, and the vast majority of salsa songs (which Cubans would called son or guaracha) also follow this pattern.

Another development that occurred in the 1940s was the invention of the mambo. Essentially, the mambo was a fusion of the Afro-Cuban rhythms with the big-band format from Swing and Jazz. Although bands in Cuba like Orquestra Riverside were already playing Mambo-style in the 1940s, the invention of the Mambo is usually credited to Cuban bandleader Pérez Prado, who spent most of his years in Mexico and elsewhere outside the island. Bandleaders like Beny Moré combined Mambo formats with son and guaracha (a similar up-tempo dance genre). The Mambo reached
its real peak in New York City in the 1950s, where bands led by Machito and the Puerto Ricans Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez incorporated Jazz-influenced instrumental solos and more sophisticated arrangements. With Prado based chiefly in Mexico and the New York mambo bands developing their own styles, Cuban music had begun taking a life of its own outside the island and the stage was set for the salsa boom of the 1960s.

PUERTO RICAN INFLUENCES

From the early 1800s until today, Puerto Ricans have avidly borrowed and mastered various Cuban music styles, including the Cuban danzón, son, guaracha, rumba, and bolero. Indeed, the richness of Puerto Rican musical culture derives in large part from the way it has adopted much of Cuban music, while contributing its own dynamic folk and contemporary popular music. Puerto Rico should not be regarded as simply a miniature Cuba, especially since genres like the seis, bomba, and plena are distinctly Puerto Rican creations, owing little to Cuban influence in their traditional forms.

Since the 1920s Puerto Rican music has been as much a product of New York City as the island itself, due to the fundamental role the migration experience has come to play in Puerto Rican culture. As a result, Puerto Rican culture can not be conceived of as something that exists of only or even primarily in Puerto Rico; rather, it has become inseparable from "Nuyorican/Newyorican" culture, which itself overlaps with black and other Latino subcultures in New York and, for that matter, with mainland North American culture as a whole.

By the 1940s, Nuyoricans like timbalero Tito Puente and vocalist Tito Rodriguez had become the top bandleaders and innovators, and the Latin dance music scene in New York came to outstrip that on the island. (Even today, there are more salsa bands and clubs in New York than in Puerto Rico).

FANIA RECORDS

The Rise of Salsa is tied to Fania Records, which had been founded in 1964 by Johnny
Pacheco, a bandleader with Dominican parentage and Cuban
musical tastes. Fania started out as a fledging independent label, with Pacheco distributing records to area stores from the trunk of his car. From 1967, Fania, then headed by Italian-American lawyer Jerry Masucci, embarked on an aggressive and phenomenally successful program of recording and promotion.

Particularly influential was composer-arranger Willie Colón, a Bronx prodigy. Colón's early albums, with vocalists Héctor Lavoe, Ismael Miranda and Ruben Bládes, epitomized the Fania style at its best and captured the fresh sound, restless energy, and aggressive dynamism of the barrio youth.

Every commercial music genre needs a catchy label, and there was a natural desire for a handier one than "recycled Cuban dance music". Hence Fania promoted the word salsa, which was already familiar as a bandstand interjection.

The 1970s were the heyday of salsa and of Fania which dominated the market. By the end of the decade, however, salsa found on the defensive against an onslaught of merengue and hip-hop and an internal creative decline.

SALSA ROMANTICA

By the late 1970s, salsa abandoned its portrayals of barrio reality in favor of sentimental love lyrics. Most of what is promoted on radio and records is the slick, sentimental salsa romantica of crooners like Eddie

Tito Puente, who should have known something about it, said "salsa is what you eat." It began as a Fania Records marketing tool and generally described their mambo records along with a few others. Dancers especially on the west coast found it too difficult to break on two, and a lot of the music is dumbed down to fit that style, but you're right. There isn't a dime's difference.

Salsa is a more modern style of mambo...
Older mambo is a bit faster.
It is the same dance... and bouth incorporate sililare rhythms.