On the heels of another fine Miami Jewish Film Festival and a thrilling evening watching Capernaum, I received an email out of the blue from Lex Gillespie pitching his documentary The Mamboniks, a film with a local angle about a certain Jewish love affair with the mambo in the 50’s. I bit.
Ironically, I had simultaneously been intrigued by an explicit cut by hip-hop phenom Anderson Paak in which the background music inexplicably contained the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikva.” Paak is not the first rapper to venture through “Hatikva;” Tupac and the Jewish rapper Remedy of Wu Tang affiliation went there years ago. In any case, the witchcraft that salsa spells, long buried memories of my Uncle Marco, Perez Prado, Desi Arnaz, and a pinch of kismet intersected with the email. Film and music meet for this story.
Long long before I fell for Fania, others were smitten by the mambo, including a collection of Jewish New Yorkers. This is the premise of The Mamboniks, screening on Sunday, March 3 at 3:15 PM at the Coral Gables Art Cinema as part of this year’s 36th Miami Film Festival brought to us by Miami Dade College. This festival, which has more brackets than Ikea, has placed The Mamboniks into its “Knight Made in Miami Feature Film” category along with eight others. Director Gillespie is a three-time Peabody Award winner himself obsessed with music, history, culture and the arts. He has previously made “Let the Good Times Roll,” a 26-hour series on African-American music from the Blues to Motown; “Whole Lotta Shakin,” 10-hours on the birth of rock ‘n roll; and “Songs in the Wind: The Music of the Andes,” “New Sounds from Indian Lands,” and “Buck Hill: The Jazz Postman.”
Machito, Tito Rodriguez and Tito Puente fronted the three major Latin dance bands that played the Palladium in the 50’s after the mambo rose in the 40’s and entranced Jewish Americans who had vacationed in Cuba in the 30’s. Jewish dancers were beguiled, becoming the mambo’s biggest non-Latino fans, ergo “the mamboniks.”
Whether stereotypes hold true or not, this film frees them to display all the confidence that liberated characters passionately pursue with tunnel vision; translated – welcome to Jewish swagger linked to the bongo. Music, dance, night clubs, deejays, and record company machers share their memories. The voices are like Larry David and Bernie Sanders; the attitude like The Honeymooners. Dancing? Like straight outta Havana. Set in New York City, the Catskills, Cuba, and South Florida, The Mamboniks tells a delightful tale.
Whether it was rock & roll or the revolution which murdered the mambo, we can never know. But Lex Gillespie, courtesy of a colorful cast of characters with chutzpah, weaves a cool documentary here, one which will take you straight to Spotify for a walk down lanes you never knew existed, like the Irving Fields Trio “Bagels and Bongos,” Ray Barretto’s “Exodus,” or Celia Cruz singing “Havah Nagilah.”
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