Mambo On My Mind

What's an old white man like me doing teaching Afro-Cuban music, art and history? I grew up in El Paso, Texas, an early training center for a globalized world. At El Paso's Dudley School, around 1944, I saw a good-looking Mexican-American girl lead the entire school in a mass conga line. She was clearly calling us to somewhere else.

I came closer to that "somewhere else" when my father gave me my first record, a 78 of "Canto Karabalí," by the great Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona. I had no idea what "Song of Calabar" meant, but the melody got to me. It was an acoustical Tarot card that said, "This is your future."

Growing up in a Latino/Anglo city, I heard on the local radio station soul numbers like "Signed, Sealed, Delivered," and from a station broadcasting from Juárez, Mexican hits like "Amor Chiquito." There was a small black population armed with boogie-woogie and the blues that would shape my mind forever. I learned how to play boogie on piano from a young man named Lloyd Stevens and marveled at the train-whistle blues and sanctified beats performed by a black El Pasoan named Jesse Brown.

In the fall of 1948 I started to study Spanish. I studied for my first test to the beat of Afro-Cuban records. When I sat down to write my exam, verbs and vocabulary came tumbling down while music played in my mind.

From that moment on, Spanish language and Afro-Cuban music took over my soul.

But a most important inspiration struck me when I arrived, with my parents and sister, for a vacation in Mexico City in March 1950. While my family crashed in the Hotel del Prado I hit the streets. I wandered into the National Palace, where I saw Diego Rivera working on a heroic mural of the ancient Aztec city of Tenochtitlán. Returning to the Prado I was startled to find Anthony Quinn in the elevator with me, in town filming the "The Brave Bulls." I opened the windows to my room to discover what appeared to be the Duke and Duchess of Windsor having tea across the patio. Four celebrities in 45 minutes. Something was going to happen. And it did. In the Prado dining room, I heard for the first time an exciting form of music that was to orient and anchor me forever: mambo.