The Mild Mambo King

There’s no fanfare to greet the man credited with creating the mambo as he arrives at the Hollywood Park Casino in Inglewood. Israel “Cachao” Lopez, a Cuban music legend, just ambles in unnoticed, bowlegged and limping slightly from a bad hip. He passes gambling tables, seemingly indifferent to what was once his only vice in life, and a costly one. The gamblers are seemingly indifferent to him.

Members of his small entourage--including his longtime manager and a loudmouth limo driver--walk ahead of or slightly behind the famed bass player. So for a moment, it looks as if Cachao is on his own, a short and stocky man making his way anonymously through the brightly lit casino where he’ll be the star attraction the following evening.

Seems like somebody should shout: Father of the Mambo in the house!

For years, disputing the paternity of the dance craze has been a popular Cuban sport. Damaso Perez Prado, the late bandleader most identified with the genre during the 1950s, once dared to say the mambo was his baby. People are still arguing over that one.

Cachao, still active at 82, will be asked about the controversy several times during his stay in L.A. over the Memorial Day weekend. Each time, he’ll answer diplomatically: There’s a kingdom for everybody, he’ll say with a smile. A king of swing, a king of the rumba. Fabricated monarchies, he calls them. They don’t really matter.

Cachao flew in from his Miami home earlier on Friday, and he’s right on time for the 4:30 p.m. news conference to announce the opening of the third annual West Coast Salsa Congress, a worldwide gathering of salsa dancers. It’s the reporters who are late.

Cachao shrugs off the delay. That’s typical, manager Richie Bonilla will later say. Cachao is the perfect gentleman. It’s not his style to complain or criticize. Why, one time in Cancun the famous bassist had to ride 15 hours by bus, forced by some mix-up to go up and down the highway in a storm, just to perform for one hour. And you didn’t hear a single grumble from the Grammy winner, who this year celebrates his 75th anniversary as a professional musician.

“Patience-plus,” says Bonilla of his client.

Before his performance on the second night of the congress, Cachao will be honored for his lifelong contributions to Latin music. On hand for the tribute will be Cuban American actor Andy Garcia, who directed the 1993 Cachao documentary that revived his idol’s career at age 75.

Until then, it’s waiting time for the reluctant mambo king. Somebody brings him a straight-backed chair and places it on a landing at the top of the escalators. There, the limo driver loudly regales the aging musician with tales of virility and Viagra. Pretty graphic stuff, complete with arm gestures illustrating how well the magic pill works.

Cachao listens politely, smiles modestly. This is a man who’s been married for 54 years. To the same woman, he likes to stress, holding up a straight index figure. In July, they’ll celebrate their 55th anniversary. He’ll get cheers when he shares that achievement with a rapt multicultural group of fans during a noon workshop the following day.

For now, he skirts the raw sex talk by mentioning “Cristina,” the Jerry Springer-like Spanish shock-talk show. A recent episode featured an elderly man who trashed his marriage by taking up with a teenager. Cachao shakes his head in disapproval. People have no respect these days, says the artist, who doesn’t smoke or drink and who keeps his morals old-fashioned, like his music.

If it weren’t for his wife, Buenaventura, he wouldn’t be who he is today. She’s a composer and a companion, the one who helped him kick a gambling addiction that once cost him $120,000 in three months back in his Havana heyday before the revolution.

Recently, his wife took a fall and couldn’t walk. Cachao had to cook for her and carry her to the bath, fearing she may never walk again. He got depressed and lost 15 pounds, visibly slimming the famous rotund figure always pictured embracing his upright bass. Good thing she recovered, but now he books only short tours so he can stay close to home.

Cachao and company move to the press conference, which is finally about to start.

“He looks so young!” gushes an American admirer who warmly greets the star. Cachao shakes her hand, his light green eyes flashing a boyish twinkle under gray eyebrows.

“Encantado,” he says in his courtly way. “Un placer.”

Congress promoter Albert Torres announces that “we’re working really hard to make sure” Cachao gets his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. With cameras whirring, Cachao then talks about his long career, also documented by the Smithsonian Institution in its jazz oral history program.

He was born in Cuba in 1918, the youngest of three children whose parents both played and taught the bass. He started playing professionally when he was 8, standing on a box to reach the upper neck of the tall instrument, which he also beats on like a bongo.

His first gig was playing music for silent movies, such as “Tarzan,” in 1926. The boy with the big bass made the sounds for the elephant, naturally.

Cachao also pursued a parallel classical career during three decades with the Havana Philharmonic Orchestra. His proudest moment was his debut with the orchestra in 1930, the year he turned 12.

In 1937, Cachao and his older brother Orestes, nicknamed “Macho,” joined Arcano y sus Maravillas. The move made mambo history.

Together, the brothers created a new rhythm arising from the final section of the danzon, the elegant Cuban ballroom dance so popular at the time. At first, dancers shunned their nuevo ritmo because it was too fast. So the brothers slowed it down and called it danzon-mambo.

Some historians say the mambo itself was “something in the air” at the time, as Cuban author-musician Leonardo Acosta puts it, a rhythm developed by several musicians working independently. But nobody disputes that the first composition named “Mambo” was penned in 1937 by Cachao and Macho Lopez.

It would take Perez Prado more than 10 years and a move to Mexico to popularize the dance with his brassy and jazzy arrangements.

“Without Perez Prado, the mambo would never have become known,” says Cachao, disavowing any rivalry with his fellow musician. “We were very good friends.”

Cachao later became known for his influential descargas, or improvised jam sessions, recorded in the late 1950s just before he left Cuba and settled in New York. But questions about the mambo dog him to dinner that evening at Havana Mania, a Cuban restaurant in Redondo Beach.

Over his picadillo, Cachao is asked if he truly doesn’t care who goes down in history as the real mambo king.

“No,” he says, “but I’m not going to fight over it.”