A Look Back At 'Mambo to Hip-Hop' A South Bronx Tale, Movie! #IamDENT

“From Mambo to Hip-Hop” dances through the history of a borough that nurtured two musical movements: the mambo that evolved into salsa, and the hip-hop that arose from the most desperate days of the South Bronx. Produced by Elena Martinez and Steve Zeitlin, who are principals in the New York folklore group City Lore, and directed by Henry Chalfant, a longtime chronicler of the South Bronx who collaborated on the early-1980’s documentary “Style Wars,” “From Mambo” rushes by, driven by rhythms that change through the decades.

Mambo and hip-hop are the kind of melting-pot phenomena that New York heats and stirs. Their roots are African, refracted through the Caribbean and the city. In their beginnings both styles also reflected, and defied, the ghetto status and economic deterioration of the South Bronx.

Mambo was visceral, sophisticated music that emerged after World War II as Cuban styles were picked up by Puerto Ricans who mingled with jazz musicians, and the Bronx became a night life mecca. The groundbreaking big band led by Machito was named the Afro-Cubans, flaunting the fact that its musicians were black, and it traded ideas with the era’s beboppers.

The documentary has exultant vintage segments from the 1950’s heyday of mambo with musicians and especially dancers who shook everything from head to toe while conga drums and timbales crackled with Cuban rhythms and New York aggression. A younger generation of musicians — now elders, like Eddie Palmieri and Ray Barretto (who died in February), who are interviewed — met playing stickball and grew up on mambo, going on to streamline and sharpen it into salsa.

“Salsa could have only happened in New York and in a place like the Bronx because of the diversity of the people that were playing it,” explains Willie Colón, the bandleader who has become a political figure in the Bronx. “It’s an inclusion and a reconciliation of all the things that we are here, and the Bronx, and the music that we made together. We not only wanted to make music; we had a goal. We wanted to convey a social and political message, and salsa was very important for that because it was our voice.”

But Latinos’ rising expectations met neglect and worse in the Bronx. The documentary shows burned-out buildings, gang fights and other factors — like the Cross Bronx Expressway, which razed and divided neighborhoods — that made the South Bronx a symbol of urban ruin in the 1970’s. But in the wreckage, hip-hop was being created. Public parks and abandoned buildings were turned into clubs as gangs sublimated rumbles into battles of words and break-dance competitions.

Hip-hop wasn’t invented by Latinos (and the documentary fails to note the strong Jamaican element in early hip-hop), but they were still in the neighborhoods, and they took to it quickly. Conga drumbeats sent break-dancers into motion, some of them reviving the most flamboyant moves of the old mambo dancers. Even when much of the South Bronx was rubble, Afro-Latin alliances were made and cultural memory held strong.