Danzón

The danzón was Cuba's refined ballroom dance, played by the string-and-flute charanga and descended from the contradanza and the same habanera current that...

The danzón was Cuba's refined ballroom dance, played by the string-and-flute charanga and descended from the contradanza and the same habanera current that tinted early jazz. Its real importance lies in its tail: in the late 1930s, inside Antonio Arcaño y sus Maravillas, the brothers Orestes and Israel "Cachao" López reinvented the danzón's final section with new syncopation and the tumbadora drum, creating the danzón de nuevo ritmo. That syncopated finale is one branch of mambo's prehistory, and the same charanga world gave birth to the chachachá. The elegant ballroom genre kept generating the dances that overtook it.

Era

Son & Trova

Traits

Cuban ballroom genre; its syncopated final/improvised section evolved into the danzón-mambo and then the mambo.