A ballroom dance derived from the Cuban rumba. In the mid-1940s it appeared in Cuban ballrooms and acquired elements of ‘swing’ and other jazz styles. It was known in the USA particularly through the band of Pérez Prado, who toured the Americas in the late 1940s; his records were popular first among Spanish speakers in the USA, and his songs (e.g. Qué rico el mambo) were performed all over the country by the early 1950s. The mambo spread throughout western Europe after 1955. It is danced by couples, either completely apart or in a ballroom embrace but held slightly apart, with a hip-rocking motion similar to the rumba but using forward and backward steps. Unlike most dances the steps begin on the fourth beat (of a 4/4 bar), against polyrhythms in the accompaniment accentuated with maracas and claves. The mambo has given rise to other ‘Latin American’ dances, notably the cha cha cha.
In salsa, the term also refers to the brass choruses featured in the montuno section.