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Artist
Cachao
12+ albums
cubanlatinlatin jazzsalsajazz
about
Israel "Cachao" López (September 14, 1918 – March 22, 2008) was a Cuban double bassist and composer who helped popularize mambo in the United States in the early 1950s. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, won several Grammy Awards, and has been described as "the inventor of the mambo". He is considered a master of descarga (Latin jam sessions). Cachao was born in 1918 in Havana, into a family of musicians, many of them bassists—around forty or more in his extended family. As an 8-year-old bongo player, he joined a children's septet that included a future famous singer and bandleader, Roberto Faz. A year later, already on double bass, he provided music for silent movies in his neighborhood theater, in the company of a pianist who would become a true superstar, the great cabaret performer Ignacio Villa, known as Bola de Nieve. His parents made sure he was classically trained, first at home and then at a conservatory. In his early teens he was already playing contrabass with the Orquesta Filarmónica de La Habana, under the baton of guest conductors including Herbert von Karajan, Igor Stravinsky and Heitor Villa-Lobos. He played with the orchestra from 1930 to 1960. He played the acoustic bass with his late, older brother, the multi-instrumentalist/composer Orestes López, who was known as "Macho". The brothers composed literally thousands of songs together and were a major influence on Cuban music from the 1930s to the 1950s. They introduced the nuevo ritmo ("new rhythm
