‘The King Of The Mambo’, Perez Prado, was born in Matanzas, Cuba, on the 11th of December 1916, and he studied piano with professor Rafael Somavilla at the Principal School of Matanzuas. He went to Mexico in 1948, bringing with him certain ideas about the Mambo that would later give him international fame, but, truth to tell, at that particular time, the thing itself was not at all clearly defined. The origins of the mambo were first conceived in the year 1938 within the general group rhythmic feeling of flautist Antonio Arcaño’s orchestra (known as Antonio Arcaño y sus Maravillas – a group appertaining to the so-called French charangas), in which bassist Orestes Lopez contributed enormously by giving impetus to a ‘new rhythm’, thereby bringing about a genuine revolution in popular Cuban music that would later become an influence on every previous type of musical form. To him is owed the danzón ‘Mambo’, the genesis of the style, for into the danzón was incorporated this new rhythm, in the third danzón or montuno, a syncopated rhythm by the eastern tres guitar players, using as well – like in the dance that would later be called the mambo – a change in the instrumental line-up, and using the tumbadora to emphasize certain accents. To this new montuno of the danzón, where its principal theme – played in two-four time – acquired a particularly syncopated characteristic, was given the generic name of Mambo. Over a rhythmic background produced from the piano, bass, violins and percussion, the flute weaved about in a decorative fashion. In this kind of danzón with the new rhythm, singers, who had been a part of the orchestras to sing danzonetes, were made redundant. The decade of the Forties brought about a revolution in the danzoneros between those of traditional trends and those of the new, with the Orchestra of Antonio Arcaño at its head. It was Dámaso Perez Prado however who, at the end of the decade, launched and popularized worldwide the dance of the mambo.