Israel "Cachao" López (September 14, 1918 – March 22, 2008) was a Cuban double bassist and composer who helped popularize mambo 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 (Latin jam sessions). Cachao was born in 1918 in Havana, into a family of musicians, many of them bassists—around forty or more in his extended family.