Gallery at the Consulate General of Mexico in San Francisco

Que Rico El Mambo! by Julio Cesar Morales is a project that explores the musical compositions and legacy of Bandleader Damaso Perez Prado, the inventor of Mambo music. Before samplers, turntables and reason, Prado was experimenting with ideas of the remix. His compositions are perhaps best marked by punctuating yells of "Ugh!" which is actually a slurring of the syllables in the phrase "dilo" which means "say it!" or "hit me!" "dilo!" served as cues for his orchestra to start, end, pause or shift tempos with a level of precision that allowed Prado to literally "cut and paste" elements of his musical imagination live and in real time. Subsequently when Prado solifidyed the Mambo in 1949 he also created the blue print for electronic music. For Que Rico El Mambo lecture, Morales utilized footage of Prado’s film from 1950 Al Son de Mambo in which he introduces Mambo to the world and clips from Prado’s 1963 film El Dengue Del Amor.