The music for Bega’s “Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit Of)” was originally composed by Cuban musician Dámaso Pérez Prado as an instrumental mambo and jazz dance song in 1949, which he later released in 1950.

Lou Bega knows exactly why “Mambo No. 5” has endured. “There’s two levels. The superficial level that we all enjoy. We dance to it—it’s joyful,” Bega says of his 1999 megahit documenting a series of ...

From Cuba to the Catskills, the mid-20th century saw the rise of an improbable partnership between American Jews and the mambo. And with its popularity, a Yiddish-inspired term entered the lexicon to ...

FOR A fast dance, the mambo took a slow boat to New York. But once it arrived here in 1946, almost a decade after the Lopez brothers introduced it in Cuba, the only question for local dancers was how ...

 This week we listen to some Afro-Cuban mambo from its beginnings in the 1940’s, through its high point in the 1960’s, to the present day. Like the words bongo and… Next we hear Pérez Prado’s biggest ...

Many music fans enjoy a time-machine fantasy where they are transported back to a famous dance club of the past. For some, it's Studio 54 or the Fillmore, but for me, the first choice would be New ...