A Mambo King in His Twilight
November 28, 2004
By SETH KUGEL
ERNIE ENSLEY'S spare one-bedroom in a Bronx housing complex
for the elderly could hardly be further removed from the
Palladium, the glamorous nightclub that presided at
Broadway and 53rd Street from the 1940's into the 60's.
But sit on the raggedy futon, close your eyes and open your
ears, and everything changes. Mr. Ensley, who turned 70
last week, has amassed in his East Tremont apartment an
extraordinary collection of the mambo music that was
performed at the Palladium and just about every other
important Latin club in New York during mambo's heyday and
in the decades since.
The items, which include thousands of audiotapes plus
videotapes and other material, fill two closets and line a
whole side of the living room, while Latin music posters
cover most of the walls. In this shrine to mambo, in fact,
about the only hint that Mr. Ensley cares about anything
else are the photos of his 26-year-old daughter, Onkeea.
For years, Mr. Ensley has received many inquiries about his
collection and, for the last few months, he has been
negotiating their transfer to the Raices Latin Music
Collection, a 16,000-item archive of Afro-Caribbean music
based in the Harbor Conservatory for the Performing Arts in
East Harlem. In April, Raices received a grant from the
Ford Foundation to obtain and preserve the tapes.
Last week, a longstanding verbal agreement between Mr.
Ensley and Raices collapsed over Mr. Ensley's proposed
consulting fee. But the negotiations will continue, and the
outcome of those talks will be of compelling interest not
only to aficionados of mambo and of Latin music in general,
but also to music historians. While other collections of
live mambo recordings may exist in private hands, musicians
and officials at Raices say the Ensley tapes may be unique
in their scope.
"As far as live recordings of so many musicians, bands,
special events - it doesn't exist," said Ramon Rodriguez,
the Conservatory director. "He has a vast knowledge of
where, who and what happened with this music, because he
was there."
Robert Farris Thompson, a professor of African and
Afro-American studies at Yale who hung out at the Palladium
in the 50's and has often invited Mr. Ensley to speak to
his classes, agrees with this assessment of the collection.
Professor Thompson has heard only samples of the
collection, but, he said, "The cultural DNA on what he gave
me was so strong, it blew me away."
Even the collector himself is impressed with his holdings.
"You wouldn't believe the music I have here," said Mr.
Ensley, still graced with his dancer's slender build, as he
gazed about his apartment one day recently.
Mr. Ensley did not just document the mambo craze: he was a
prominent part of it, a fixture at the Palladium as both a
dancer and a recorder of live shows, as well as a D.J. at
other spots. Even today, Mr. Ensley is a keeper of the
flame, still spinning old mambos and pachangas at Orchard
Beach on summer Sundays, and working regularly as a D.J. at
clubs catering to the older set.
But the modern scene is just a faint echo of the one that
flourished in the 50's and 60's, when dance floors shook
with the rhythms of that singular musical style, especially
in this city. "Mambo was a tale of many cities," Professor
Thompson said, "but the richest vein was New York."
Dancing That Made the Ceiling Shake
In the late 1940's,
Dámaso Pérez Prado, a Cuban who had moved to Mexico,
experimented with combining Afro-Cuban rhythms with the
saxophone and trumpet riffs that were a hallmark of big
bands. These innovations, on top of others in Cuba in the
previous decades, created what came to be known as mambo, a
term derived from an African word meaning "conversation
with the gods." Mr. Pérez Prado championed a version of the
new sound that was popular on the West Coast, but New York
was also a mambo capital.
Mambo was an early Latin crossover success, but unlike so
many other crossovers, it did not immediately get watered
down for consumption by its new broader audience, at least
not in New York. But that did not dim its allure. A 1954
article in Life magazine offered its vast readership - the
very definition of mainstream America - step-by-step mambo
instructions, along with a photo of Oregon schoolchildren
learning mambo in gym class.
Some mambo lyrics made this broad interest explicit, such
as these lines from "Mambo a la Savoy," by Machito and His
Afro-Cuban Orchestra:
Here's the latest dance creation, it's not a fad, the real
sensation
Latins can do it, you can do it too.
It was started by a Latin, who brought
the dance to old
Manhattan
And he called it Mambo a la Savoy.
To Professor Thompson of Yale, who is working on a book
called "Staccato Incandescence: The Story of Mambo," the
music served an important role in midcentury America: it
kept the big bands alive and filled the gap between what he
described as the "apparent demise of jazz dancing" and the
birth of rock and roll. As Professor Thompson put it, "It
kept the world dancing between 1939 and 1959."
The music was also innovative. Professor Thompson has
written that mambo was "nothing less than the
Africanization of one of the deepest conceits of the West,
symphonic music, and the splitting asunder of the Western
couple dance." Never before had couples who started in
classic ballroom positions been permitted to separate and
dance unfettered on their own.
Mambo, which came of age on the eve of the civil rights
era, also supplied an oasis where color and ethnicity
mattered little. At the Palladium, for example, even though
Latinos, blacks, Jews and Italians sometimes went dancing
on different nights, mambo still created one of the most
diversified scenes of the day, especially on Wednesday,
which was show night, with professional contests and dance
exhibitions. In an often repeated story, the owner of the
Palladium was asked if he was bothered by the mixing at his
club. His answer: The only color he cared about was green.
The Palladium was indisputably the center of mambo in New
York, in part because it was the home base for the
orchestras of Tito Puente, the percussion master, and the
singer Tito Rodriguez. Subway riders headed for the
nightclub heard the strains of the music even before they
pushed through the turnstiles and, in the drugstore beneath
the Palladium, the dancing made the ceiling shake.
Decked-out dancers used to check out their look on the
mirrored staircase as they went upstairs to the dance
floor. Celebrities like Marlon Brando, separated from the
dancers by a wrought-iron fence, were common sights. Mambo
lessons began at 8 p.m. for the rhythmless masses, and as
the evening proceeded the dancers followed the music and
the music followed the dancers, as they invented new steps
and tried to outshine one another.
Moving Like a Marionette
Ernie Ensley's first trip to the
Palladium came when he was a teenager, after he had learned
the basics of mambo from a friend and practiced a routine.
It was 1952, Machito and His Afro-Cuban Orchestra was
playing, and it was show night. In a few years, Mr. Ensley
was hired to be a dancer in the Palladium dance contests,
performing with his longtime partner, Dotty Adams. When the
dancers separated from their partners to strut their stuff,
Mr. Ensley eagerly did so, moving like a marionette,
breaking, splitting and swinging.
"Your dance steps had to be so good," he said, "nobody else
could do it." Which is not to say that nobody tried; in
fact, everybody tried to imitate the moves of showcased
dancers like Mr. Ensley. But at least in his eyes, they
failed. "I did it smoothly," he explained. "Other people
did them roughly."
Some of his contemporaries disagree. "He had a creative
style that not everyone liked," said Don Nellin, a writer
in Los Angeles who frequented the Palladium in the 50's.
"Some of his movements were dramatic and jerky. It was all
his own."
But whatever the quality of his dancing, Mr. Ensley was in
demand. In the summer, he used to hop into the Cadillac
owned by his manager, who was known as Killer Joe Piro, and
drive up to the resorts in the Catskills where many Jewish
families took vacations. Mambo was especially popular among
Jews, who counted among their ranks such mambo-linked
personalities as Al (Alfredito) Levy, a bandleader, and
Dick (Ricardo) Sugar, a D.J. on radio station WEVD.
Mr. Ensley had his chances to mingle with the famous. One
day in the 50's, a man approached him and passed along a
dance request from Julie Newmar, the actress who would
later be known as Catwoman. As the couple danced, a crowd
so large gathered that the Palladium's security officers
made them stop.
"God, what a beautiful woman!" Mr. Ensley recalled. "I
regret I never followed up with her." He next saw Ms.
Newmar decades later, when he bumped into her walking her
dog on Amsterdam Avenue. "We talked about that night," he
said. "And she was still beautiful."
Taping, Sometimes in Secret
The celebrities he became
closest to, however, were the musicians.
One night in 1960, a woman who was a great dancer asked Mr.
Ensley for help operating her new reel-to-reel tape
recorder, and he fell in love - with the machine. "When I
played the tape back," he recalled, "it was very exciting."
Soon he had his own equipment. "I started to get a
collection," he said, "and then it started to be a habit."
He went from one microphone to two, to four, and then to
one for every member of the band. He stood by the controls,
adjusting levels until everything was exactly the way he
wanted it.
Mr. Ensley was not the only person recording these events.
Anibal Vasquez, a dancer who became famous with the Mambo
Aces, had made tapes that Mr. Ensley occasionally copied,
and some albums, like "Tito Rodriguez: Live at the
Palladium," were recorded at the clubs. Mr. Ensley was
completely taken with the process.
"When I was recording, when I was mixing the tapes, it was
fascinating that if I wanted more lead singer, I could just
turn the thing on the mixer," he said. "That gave me a
sense of power. I could make a band sound good or sound
bad." He soon amended that statement: he could make a good
band sound bad, but he could not make a bad band sound
good.
Although at first Mr. Ensley mostly taped on the sly, the
musicians came to trust him and knew that he would not sell
copies of their music. As a result, he often got permission
to tape them, even when such taping violated union rules.
Even when performers would not let him tape, however, he
often did so anyway, arriving before the show with his
clunky equipment and pretending he was with the band. By
the mid-60's, he was so well known that this strategy could
backfire; once Machito caught him when he stuck his head
out a balcony window at the Riverside Plaza, and Mr. Ensley
had to stop taping.
When he did tape, Mr. Ensley was typically obliging to the
musicians. Once, when Tito Puente was performing, a song
went wrong and Mr. Puente loudly berated a member of his
band. He asked Mr. Ensley not to keep that incident on
tape, and Mr. Ensley recorded over it.
Mr. Ensley's tapes did not go straight from the clubs to
the closet. He used the tapes to become a well-known D.J.,
starting at Delira, a club in Greenwich Village. His D.J.
gig at Orchard Beach began about 1962, and he still has the
converter that he used to hook up his machine to a car
battery.
For all the fun he was having, the taping hurt his personal
life, most noticeably leading to the breakup of a
three-year marriage he had in his 20's. "I'd go tape on a
Wednesday night, and I'd make copies of the tapes, and that
took a lot of time," he said. "It wasn't a life. At the
time, I couldn't see it, but that's what happened."
Taping didn't pay the bills either, and Mr. Ensley earned
just $15 a night for dancing once a week at the Palladium
and later at the Corso. To make ends meet, he worked full
time for 35 years as a shipping manager for a company
called Commercial Plastics, at first in Greenwich Village
and then in Richmond Hill, Queens.
Not that anyone at the Palladium - which closed its doors
in 1966 - knew much about Commercial Plastics or the
outside life of its habitués. "Once you hit that place,"
Mr. Nellin, the writer, said, "it didn't matter who you
were or what you did for a living. It was all about the
dance."
A Music Fading Into Memory
Mr. Ensley's tapes are a mystery in plain sight. They are
unmarked, vast - and fragile. Sometimes, when he puts one
in his reel-to-reel machine, it snaps.
The fitful discussions with the Raices Collection will
continue, but whoever ultimately acquires the tapes will
probably face the daunting task of identifying, digitizing
and cataloging them. And Mr. Ensley is probably in the best
position to name the bands and the date and location of
each performance.
As this task of musical preservation looms into view, the
heyday of mambo recedes. Mambo first began to fade from the
national scene in the 60's; whereas Mr. Pérez Prado once
beat out even Elvis on the charts, Tito Puente was no match
for the Beatles, and successive Latin genres like cha-cha,
pachanga and bugalu never quite captivated the country.
Mr. Ensley senses this eclipse of mambo, and in a deeply
personal way. One recent afternoon, he learned through a
phone call to his apartment that a member of the orchestra
Sonora Matancera had died. "There's a lot of people leaving
us," he said after hanging up. "This is the fourth one in
the past month that I remember."
He cringes when he meets a young Latino who has never heard
of Machito or Puente, and like many old-timers, he also
cringes at modern salsa. Despite a global popularity far
exceeding mambo's - Japan and Europe are full of salsa
fanatics - many mambo veterans view salsa as a watered-down
product, one that focuses less on instrumentation and
rhythm and more on the singers.
Nevertheless, "it's a dying cause," Mr. Ensley said of
mambo, noting how few clubs and bands remain. "I can't see
it getting any better."
But the stars of the era last for a long time - Tito Puente
and Celia Cruz performed up until their recent deaths - and
an active, if small, community of mambo dancers endures.
Although other musical forms have clearly supplanted mambo,
mambo lives within them. In salsa and merengue, for
instance, the improvised riffs of the brass section and the
saxophones are called the "mambo" section. The old music
and its world still resonate in fiction; not only in such
classics as Oscar Hijuelos's 1989 novel "The Mambo Kings
Play Songs of Love" but also in such new works as Marta
Moreno Vega's "When the Spirits Dance Mambo."
"It's very much alive," Professor Thompson said of mambo,
"but in strains and tendencies. In a sense nothing has
changed, while everything has changed."
He could have been describing Mr. Ensley and his tapes.
When he plays the old music in his apartment, he turns up
the volume much higher than you would expect from a
70-year-old man. It is as if you are in a sparkling
nightclub in his glory days. Close your eyes, and you are.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/ny...583da2d77960e0
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