Mambo madness

Latin music has been circling the globe for more than a century, creating dance crazes and inspiring local forms of music. From tango to reggaeton, with stops for mambo, rumba, son and salsa, bolero, Latin jazz and more, the Latin music juggernaut just keeps rolling on.

You can hear the Latin music influence on different popular music genres around the planet — it’s in music as diverse as some of Professor Longhair’s New Orleans R&B tunes, and the bolero and cha cha cha style luk thung songs of Thailand (think of luk thung legend Surapon Sombatchareon’s many boleros). It’s in Japanese popular songs like enka, and Korean ones like trot; Japan even created an original Japanese Latin rhythm, the dodompa. A track I like to spin at my DJ sessions, Mambo El Soudani, comes from Sudan. And the list goes on.

But perhaps the place…