Rating: 4/5
My friend Dai gifted me The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love at just the right time, as I’m facilitating a casino partnerwork class on musicality, and a huge part of that is exploring Timba’s musical influences. I didn’t know Mambo, ChaChaCha and Pachanga all originated in Cuba!
The book follows two Cuban brothers who leave Havana and chase their music dreams in 1950s New York, where Mambo exploded in popularity. The book lays bare the romance and realities of life as immigrant musicians: the shitty part-time jobs, the “rum, rumps and rumba,” the 15 minutes of fame.
“Many of his friends were that way, troubled souls. They would always seem happy – especially when they’d talk about women and music – but when they had finished floating through the euphoric layer of their sufferings, they opened their eyes in a world of pure sadness and pain.”
It’s full of melancholy, and about mourning your homeland, lovers, family, and youth. Hijuelos’ passages about grief and aging were especially poignant, as I’ve struggled with both this year. I can’t help but romanticize musicians who fraternize and grow new genres of music (i.e mambo in the 1950s, salsa in the 1970s, hip hop in the 1980s), despite the costs to their health and families. I enjoyed the scenes of the brothers and their friends jamming in a cramped Brooklyn apartment to the smells of rice, beans, and pork fat… who knew they would become household names?
The plot is structured like a cassette tape, starting with Side A (the Mambo Kings’ rise) and then Side B (what happens after tragedy). I found Side B hard to get through, a slow spinning to the end, as the book’s climax occurs in Side A. Perhaps that was the point. Side A’s Greatest Hits always come with Side B’s lesser known songs and struggles.
Still, this book will linger. I’ve DJ’d, choreographed performances, and helped run weekly salsa parties for over 3 years now, and think, these might be my “Mambo Kings” years, when life was full of music, creative expression, and serendipitous encounters. I won’t take them for granted.