Annotations for Sounds: Background--music--mambo

Entonces en el año 37 entre mi Hermano y yo nos… [transition to English dub] In 1937, between my brother and I, we took care of this mambo business. We gave our traditional music, our danzón, a 180-degree turn. What we did was modernize it… [transition back to original audio] …lo que hicimos fue modernizarlo.

In the late 1950s, Cachao got a group of Cuba's top musical artists together for a set of 4:00 AM recording sessions that started after the musicians got off work at Havana's hotels and nightclubs. The group included Cachao's brother, Orestes, El Negro Vivar, Guillermo Barreto, and Alfredo León of Cuba's legendary Septeto Nacional. Cachao says he called those jam sessions descargas, literally discharges, because of the uninhibited atmosphere that surrounded those recordings.