Dámasco Perez Prado, the acknowledged father and ‘King Of The Mambo’, was born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1916. He received his musical education there, studying classical piano in his early youth. During the late ‘30s he began to play with small local bands, and in 1940 he got his first important job as pianist-arranger with the great Orquesta Casino de la Playa, replacing the pianist Anselmo Sacasas. After hours he would sit in on jam sessions with the guitar players, and their collective cross-rhythms and “jazzy” syncopation provided him with the seeds of the mambo – which he later claimed was merely “Afro-Cuban rhythms with a dash of American swing.” In 1946 he founded his own band and developed his own formula – keep it clean and punchy, with shouting brass and diamond-bright percussion. Then, through a combination of all the above, he hit upon the mambo one day, while doodling at the piano. In the mambo, the brass section does extraordinary things with the melody and rhythm, supported by the saxophone section, while the Cuban percussion provides the necessary base. Its most notable characteristics were a melodic development over a backdrop of percussive intervals, and the use of the human voice with (mostly) meaningless lyrics – but of tremendous rhythmic importance. In 1947 Prado took his band for its first road trip to Veneuela and Argentina, and also made his initial recordings. No great impression was made on the Cuban public, and like Stan Kenton (whom he greatly admired) and the Beboppers, he was considered too ‘far out’ and ahead of his time. It was in Mexico, in 1948, where Prado and the Mambo finally made their first big impact, causing the most excitement since Pancho Villa! He was so well received there that he decided to form a band right there in Mexico City. This selection of his early recordings, made in Cuba during the late ‘40s, demonstrate Prado’s developing musical conceptions of that time when he was poised on the treshold of becoming internationally famous – and ‘The King Of The Mambo’.