I first learned about mambo as a kid when my father relayed a famous story about Perez Prado getting banned from Mexico for wanting to turn the country’s national anthem into a mambo tune. My dad loved that story. He tended to repeat himself, so I probably heard that tale a hundred times. In any event, decades before I was born, Prado was the reigning king of mambo, one of the first to ever introduce the form to America.

These days, San Jose claims its own heroic mambo arranger in Aaron Lington, who also coordinates the jazz studies program at SJSU. Along with the Pacific Mambo Orchestra (PMO), Lington just won a Grammy, and the band just happens to be among those tearing up the Salsa Stage at the San Jose Jazz Summer Fest this Friday. The band’s self-titled debut work, an independent, Kickstarter-funded CD, took home Best Tropical Latin Album, quite an accomplishment. Steffen Kuehn and Christian Tumalan are the bandleaders, while Lington did much of the arranging on the CD. The 19-piece band consists of four trumpets, four trombones, five saxophones, piano, bass, timbales, congas, bongos and Alexis Guillen on vocals—all of which harkens back to the classic mambo sounds of the ’40s to the ’60s.

As a band arranger, sax player and music professor, Lington says the project was a new challenge for him. On one hand, his experience arranging for big bands came in handy, since the lineup is not that different, but writing for mambo rhythms was not second nature to him.

“The instrumentation, horn-wise, is exactly the same as a regular, traditional big band,” Lington explains. “That part is the same, in the way that you voice for those instruments is exactly the same as if I was writing a Basie-style chart. A good Gm9 voicing with the 9 in the lead trumpet sounds good whether it’s being played with a Latin band or a jazz band. So those kinds of technical aspects are the same.”

But coming from a jazz and a classical background, Lington never did a whole lot of writing for clave-based rhythms until Pacific Mambo. Arranging for the 3-2 clave style was quite a bit different. He had to pore through Rebeca Mauleon’s acclaimed Salsa Guidebook to acquaint himself with how to arrange for those rhythms. In any event, his work paid off.

Lington says Kuehn and Tumalan gave gave him carte blanche to arrange the tunes however he wanted. He didn’t really have to edit much of anything. His initial ideas came out pretty solid and everyone seems to dance like mad during the gigs.

Lington’s arrangement of the Stevie Wonder track, “Overjoyed,” for example, is the most downloaded track on the album and the most requested tune when the band plays live. Lington’s own stamp can be heard during an interlude he threw into the arrangement. Ostinatos in the bari sax and bass trombones compliment diminished harmonies and timbale solos—quite a stretch for a mambo tune.

“I’m not saying everything I did is maybe one hundred percent accurate to the traditions,” Lington confessed. “But I would say it’s really pretty darn close. And I haven’t really heard any complaints from anyone.”

In fact, just the opposite happened. After some intense PR work promoting the heck out of the project, Pacific Mambo was nominated for a Grammy. They were overjoyed, but no one honestly thought it would go any farther than that.

“We were amazed to get nominated,” Lington says. “I was very surprised. Because we’re independent. And we were the only independent recording that was in the category. Everything else was Sony and all these major labels. We were up against Marc Anthony. I honestly thought that would probably be it. Still an amazing honor, but I thought for sure we’d lose to Marc Anthony. He’s huge.”

Pacific Mambo’s arrangements unfold at a frenetic pace, practically suited for dancing. Expect the ghost of Perez Prado to emerge from the woodwork and bless the Salsa Stage with his presence. As Tumalan announced at the Grammy Awards, from the podium: “The mambo is back. And it’s here to stay.”

He didn’t invent funk, but for five decades Bootsy Collins has been one of the genre’s most recognized ambassadors. From behind his signature star-burst glasses, outsized top hats and custom made “Space Bass,” his lilting vocals bespeak depths of mellow most of us mere mortals can only imagine.

From his lips, the Bootzilla can take a single word—“baby”—and transmute it into something divine, instilling it with all the glory and poetry of a Shakespearean sonnet.

And then there’s his bass playing. Collins’ progressions are perpetually shifting and inventive, yet unpretentious—firmly grounded in the classic funk traditions pioneered by the likes of James Brown and further spun out by Funkadelic—two acts for which Bootsy played before striking out on his own.

The iconic funk bassist, will headline San Jose’s 2014 Jazz Festival on Friday, Aug. 8, but when he speaks with Metro from his home outside Cincinnati, where the Mothership is refueling between stages of a European tour, he has his sights set on his next stop: Batumi, Georgia—a resort on the Black Sea, which once served as a playground for Communist Party bigwigs.

The 64-year-old Collins laughs, tickled by the notion that the Soviet Union is long gone, but he remains, and will soon spread his technicolor gospel to the former Eastern Bloc.

“There’re a lot of things going on that, you know, we can expose the funk to,” he says. “It’s gonna be a blast!”

It’s just the latest improbable episode in a life full of improbabilities. Born in Cincinnati in 1951, the son of a single mother, William “Bootsy” Collins was just 18, and didn’t even own a bass, when his group, the Pacemakers, was tapped to become James Brown’s backing band—a huge break, which the young Collins quickly turned his back on. Just 11 months later, in 1971, Bootsy walked.

As luck—or perhaps destiny—would have it, lightning struck a second time when Bootsy met George Clinton, the mad genius behind Funkadelic, whose acid-funk freakouts were attracting fans in the Detroit area. In Clinton, Collins found a musical mentor and collaborator, and with Collins, Clinton scored some of his biggest hits.

Collins finished the ’70s as the frontman of Bootsy’s Rubber Band. Since then, he’s done countless collaborations with artists as diverse as Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads, house-era charmers Deee-Lite, Snoop Dogg, and even the Reverend Al Sharpton.

By his own admission, music was Collins’ ticket out of a hard-knock life that seemed likely to land him in prison. But that’s not how it felt at the time: Then, as now, Bootsy was just following his bliss.

“It seemed like everybody was always happy around music and having a good time,” he recalls. “That pulled me toward wanting to play—watching people getting off and having a good time. That was a big part of it. And of course the girls—definitely.”

However, the biggest draw may well have been was Collins’ older brother, Phelps—also known as Catfish. “I was just trying to prove to [Catfish] that I was worthy of hanging with him,” Bootsy confesses. Eight years older than Bootsy, Catfish was already playing in bands when Bootsy was barely a teen.

Though the Collins brothers would ultimately enter into a musical partnership that lasted until his older brother’s death in 2010, initially, Catfish wasn’t so keen on Bootsy getting into the profession. “He didn’t take me seriously,” Bootsy recalls. “In fact, he was kind of like against it.”

But persistence and talent won over the skeptical brother. In Bootsy’s retelling, success was just an easy glide from there: “Once I did that, everything started clicking. Everything started, just, you know, working.”

Perhaps it’s true, because it was soon after that James Brown came calling. Virtually overnight, the Collins brothers went from obscurity to funk aristocracy.

Regarding his decision to leave Brown and join Funkadelic, Bootsy recalls the shifting sounds of the early ’70s: “Things were definitely changing. You used to have a solo artist and maybe, like, a saxophone. But Jimi [Hendrix] changed that. By him coming on the scene with the wild guitar thing, that led into bands wanting to be the front guys—like Chicago and Blood, Sweat & Tears. It was more than just a singer with a back-up band. The bands became the stars.”

It’s a crooked pedigree that traces itself from Hendrix to the marching-band prog-rock of Chicago to Funkadelic—but therein lies genius.

When asked how it felt to step out from the band and become a frontman, Bootsy laughs, saying, “In the first place, it was George [Clinton] who who talked me into the frontman thing. He always said I was a star—whether I wanted to be one or not. I never looked at it like that.”

It’s hard to believe a man with star shaped glasses doesn’t recognize his own star power, Bootsy insists with a laugh that he still can’t believe he’s come so far and lasted so long. “I don’t know what was happening,” he says. “I just went with it. I know I took a lot of LSD, though.”

San Jose local Maxx Cabello Jr. is known for his guitar chops, his soulful voice and for mixing it up with a wide range of styles. He plays everything from slow soul jams, blazing electric blues and Latin rock. In the case of his new video, “My Love,” he digs into old-school romantic soul, a throwback to the days before the style was dominated by drum machines and synthesizers.

A quick Google search reveals footage of Cabello playing eight minute blues guitar solos, which he’s quite talented at, but the simplicity of “My Love” makes it a good place to start for people new to his music. Like the video, the song is smooth and sweet—just a straight forward love song with nothing over-complicated about it.

The video holds special significance because it helped Cabello land an opening spot at San Jose’s Jazz Summer Fest this Friday after submitting it to festival organizers in a contest where people voted for the song they liked best. “My Love” won by a landslide.

Cabello opens the San Jose Jazz Festival on the main stage at Cesar Chavez Park this Friday at 5:30pm.