Israel “Cachao” Lopez, 89, the Cuban bass player credited with creating the mambo, has died at a Miami-area hospital.
Family spokesman Nelson Albareda said the bassist and composer known simply as Cachao (ka-CHAH-o) died early Saturday of complications resulting from kidney failure.
Cachao was, in his last years, the most important living figure in Cuban music, on or off the island. And according to Cuban-music historian Ned Sublette, he was “arguably the most important bassist in 20th-century popular music,” innovating not only Cuban music but also influencing the now familiar bass lines of American R&B, “which have become such a part of the environment that we don’t even think where they came from.”
Cachao and his brother Orestes are most widely known for their late-1930s invention of the mambo, a hot coda to the popular but stately danzon that allowed the dancers to break loose at the end of a piece. Typically modest, Cachao always said that it was bandleader Damaso Perez Prado who made the beat world famous in the ’50s.
Dr. Frank M. Berger, 94, who helped start the modern era of drug development with his invention of Miltown, the first mass-market psychiatric drug and a forerunner of medical and cultural phenomena like Valium and Prozac, died March 16 in his home in Manhattan.
The cause was cardiac arrest after a fall, said his wife, Alma Christine Spadi Berger.
Berger was working at the Yorkshire, England, laboratory of a British drug company, trying to find a preservative for penicillin, when he noticed that a chemical agent he was working with had a calming effect on laboratory animals.
After moving to an American firm in New Jersey, Berger and a chemist, Bernard Ludwig, synthesized a related tranquilizing compound, called meprobamate, and in May 1955 introduced the drug under the trade name Miltown, after a hamlet near their laboratory. Sales exploded.
It became clear in the late 1950s that Miltown was habit-forming for some people, and sales began to fall off. (It was never withdrawn from the market and is now rarely prescribed.) But by then, the era of big-time psychopharmacology was underway, and similar drugs, like Librium, soon would capture the public imagination.
McClatchy Newspapers
The New York Times
