Around this time, Prado's ideas began coalescing into mambo—an upbeat and brassy dance music in which horns and percussion provide punchy punctuation. Like the cha-cha-cha, the mambo was most likely a dance before it was a style of music; both the chachacha and mambo evolved from the traditional Cuban rumba. Perez sometimes claimed he heard the mambo emerging from the percussive cross-rhythms of five or six guitarists simultaneously jamming after hours in Cuban clubs.
Though Prado—and mambo—grew increasingly...