Arthur Leslie Benjamin (1893-1960) was an Australian from Sydney who went to London at the age of 18 to further his musical education at the Royal College of Music, where he was a pupil of Stanford. He served in the army and air force during World War I, returned to Australia to teach piano, but returned to England in 1921.

Although he was primarily a "serious" composer, he did have a flair for light music (or what Americans call "pops"). Even in some concertos he exhibits a flair for popular-style melodies and rhythms. Benjamin is best known outside the concert hall for having composed The Storm Clouds, the opening fragment of a pseudo-cantata that leads up to a big cymbal crash during which a gunshot is fired in the Alfred Hitchcock film called The Man Who Knew Too Much.

The Jamaican Rumba is perhaps his best-known individual composition. It is part of a 1938 work for two pianos called Two Jamaican Pieces: "Jamaican Song" and "Jamaican Rumba." The original version was an immediate hit among duo-pianists. Its success prompted Benjamin to write a full orchestration for it.

The Rumba is a lively yet relaxed dance movement, with the spirit of a dance that might be heard in one of the Fred Astaire movies of the day that involved either a trip south of the United States or a visit to a night club featuring a Latin band. Its popularity crested on the vogue for South American and Caribbean sounds that was a feature of American jazz and popular music of the 1930s and 1940s.

During his career, Benjamin wrote several pieces of similar lightness and style, including the orchestral pieces Prelude to Holiday, From San Domingo, Caribbean Dance, Hyde Park Galop, North American Square Dance Suite, and Harmonica Concerto; and such piano and two-piano pieces as Let's Go Hiking, Chinoiserie, Haunted House, Squirrel's Parade, Two Jamaican Street Songs, and Jamaicalypso.

© Joseph Stevenson, Rovi