When Paquito Hechavarria and German Pifferrer were kids, mambo was new and Dámaso Perez Prado ruled. "I remember when I was little, I used to sit at the piano," says the 62-year-old Hechavarria, spreading his plump fingers and pounding the air just above the glass table where he sits on the patio outside a Westchester recording studio. "GUNG, gung-gung-gung, GUNG-gung, GUNG-gung-gung," he sings, marking the melody for Perez Prado's "Mambo No. 5." His scraggly beard barely covers the stains on his cheeks from too many years of too many cigarettes, but the brightness in his eyes belongs to a twelve-year-old boy. "The bridge was a little hard," he remembers, spreading his fingers further and widening the distance between his hands, "but I did what I could." His hands freeze in the air: "And this is where he would say #@!" Hechavarria grunts ferociously, but the guttural emission is still a far cry from the original Mambo King's trademark ejaculation, the primal scream of... More >>>