Mambo dancer ever" by Life magazine and the legendary Tito Puente. Pedro Aguilar was nicknamed "Cuban Pete" and ("The knife") for his mambo dance style. The modern mambo dance from New York was popularized in the late 1960s into the 1970s by George Vascones, president of a dance group known as the Latin Symbolics, from the Bronx, New York. George Vascones continued the mambo dance tradition which started two decades earlier during the "Palladium era". It was followed in the 1980s by Eddie Torres, Angel Rodriguez of RazzM'Tazz Mambo Dance Company, and others, many of whom were 2nd generation New York Puerto Ricans. This style is sometimes danced to mambo music, but more often to salsa dura (old-school salsa). It is termed "mambo on 2" because the break, or direction change, in the basic step occurs on count 2. The Eddie Torres and Razz M'Tazz schools each have different basic steps, even though they share this same basic feature. Eddie Torres describes his version as a "street" style he developed out of what he saw on the Bronx streets. The RazzM'Tazz version is closer to the Palladium Mambo (from the Palladium ballroom in the 1950s), whose basic step was in turn derived from Cuban son, with which it shares its timing (234 - 678, with pauses on 1 and 5) both styles derived from the American Mambo with the freestyle steps based on jazz and tap steps. See also Mambo (music) Dirty Dancing References External links "Luis Oliveira And His Bandodalua Boys - Chihuahua", YouTube, track 04 from Ultra-Lounge, Vol. 2: Mambo Fever. Uploaded 2009-08-31. Ballroom dance Dance in Cuba Dance terminology Latin dances