(b Matanzas, 11 Dec 1916; d Mexico City, 14 Sept 1989). Cuban pianist, bandleader, composer and arranger. After a formal musical training in Matanzas he moved to Havana in the early 1940s, where he played the piano and arranged for the orchestra of Paulina Alvarez (1942) and the well-known Orquesta Casino de la Playa (1943–6). His growing incorporation of big band jazz influences was not well received, and he left Cuba in 1947, settling in Mexico City the following year. Establishing a mambo big band, he made several recordings through the next decade, including his famous Mambo No.5 and Qué rico el mambo. While often criticized for falsely claiming to have invented the mambo, his popularization of this genre in mainstream North America is undisputable, and his recordings of Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White (1955) and Patricia (1958) made it to the top of the US charts for several weeks.
Remembered more for his goatee and vocal exclamations than for his musical talents, the self-titled ‘Mambo King’ was a brilliant pianist and an accomplished arranger. His appeal for non-Latino audiences lay in his use of dramatic horn lines and simple, less rhythmically complex arrangements than those of authentic Cuban bands. Among the most commercially successful of all Latin musicians, he was also popular in South and Central America through his appearances in dozens of Mexican film musicals. In addition to his dance hits, he wrote more ambitious, serious works for mambo orchestra, such as Voodoo Suite (1954), Mosaico Cubano (1956) and La suite de las Américas (1958–9), and also arranged classical favourites by Rachmaninoff and Grieg in mambo style.
LISE WAXER