Long before Miami Sound Machine and decades before reggaeton, Dámaso Pérez Prado was packing dance floors with blaring brass, pounding percussion and the signature grunts that helped make mambo a worldwide craze. Offstage, the Cuban bandleader was nearly as hard to miss: flamboyant suits, heavy gold chains, jeweled rings and a Cadillac with tiger-stripe upholstery.
Books & Books will revisit that larger-than-life career Wednesday, Sept. 9, when biographer John Radanovich comes to Coral Gables to discuss his new book, Pérez Prado: King of the Mambo, a portrait of the musician who carried a Cuban dance rhythm onto stages, records and movie screens around the world.
The free event begins at 7 p.m. at the bookstore’s 265 Aragon Ave. flagship. An RSVP provides general entry but does not guarantee a seat, and the store recommends arriving early. Copies of the book will be available for purchase.
A musician built for a biography
Prado was born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1916 and studied classical piano before working with orchestras in Havana, including a stint with Sonora Matancera. He arrived in Mexico City in late 1948, just as the city’s music and film industries were flourishing, and in 1949 recorded “Qué rico el mambo” and “Mambo No. 5” for RCA Victor. The latter became one of his signature numbers decades before Lou Bega turned it into an international pop hit of his own in 1999.
Prado’s commercial high point came in 1955 with “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” his mambo treatment of a French popular song. The recording spent 10 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Best Sellers in Stores chart and also topped the British singles chart.
But the records tell only part of the story Radanovich sets out to capture.
Prado became a star in Mexico’s golden age of cinema, later lived in Los Angeles for more than a decade and earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. His taste for spectacle followed him everywhere. The new biography recounts the jewels, gold chains, flamboyant clothes and unabashed attraction to kitsch that made his public image nearly as distinctive as his music.
Radanovich comes to the subject with considerable experience in Cuban music. He previously wrote Wildman of Rhythm: The Life and Music of Benny Moré and has covered jazz, Cuban music and entertainment for publications including Downbeat, Offbeat and the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
Mambo beyond the dance craze
The book also makes the case that Prado’s importance did not end when America’s mambo craze faded.
Radanovich places Prado within a wider musical exchange among Cuba, Mexico and the United States, arguing that Prado and his contemporaries helped feed Latin rhythms and arranging ideas into early R&B and rock ’n’ roll. The biography follows those echoes into much later popular music, drawing connections to performers including Shakira, Jennifer Lopez and Karol G.
That makes Prado more than a wonderfully dressed relic of the 1950s. His career followed an unusually international route: a Cuban musician shaped in Havana, launched to mass popularity from Mexico City and eventually established in Los Angeles, carrying mambo with him as it moved from Latin dance halls into the American mainstream.
It is also what gives Radanovich plenty to discuss beyond the familiar hits. Pérez Prado: King of the Mambo is as much a story of mid-century Cuban, Mexican and American cultural exchange as it is the biography of one bandleader.
For readers interested in Cuban music, the golden age of Mexican cinema or the roots of Latin influence in American popular music, Wednesday’s appearance offers a chance to hear the research behind that story directly from the author who assembled it.
If you go…
John Radanovich discusses Pérez Prado: King of the Mambo at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 9, at Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. Admission is free, with RSVP encouraged. The 288-page hardcover, published by Bloomsbury Academic, lists for $35.
