Israel Cachao López

Israel "Cachao" López, often known just as "Cachao" was a Cuban mambo musician, bassist and composer, who has helped bring mambo music to popularity in the United States in the early 1950s.

He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, won several Grammy Awards, and has been described as "the inventor of the mambo". He is considered a master of descarga. Cachao was born in 1918 in Havana, into a family of musicians, many of them bassists?around forty or more in his extended family.

As an 8-year-old bongo player, he joined a children's septet that included a future famous singer and bandleader, Roberto Faz. A year later, already on acoustic bass, he provided music for silent movies in his neighborhood theater, in the company of a pianist who would become a true superstar, the great cabaret performer Ignacio Villa, known as Bola de Nieve.