Carolina Camacho is a Dominican singer, songwriter, dancer and instrumentalist. She builds her music out of Dominican folkloric rhythms crossed with electronics and vocal jazz, and she works a subject most Dominican popular music has avoided.

Afrotaína

The word is hers, and it is an argument. Dominican national identity has long been told as Spanish and Taíno, with the African part left out or actively denied. Putting Afro and Taíno together in one coined word refuses that arrangement.

She has talked about it directly in interview — about accepting her own Afro identity and about the African continent that is inside the music she grew up with. NPR and Latino USA took the conversation to a North American audience in 2017.

Conservatory and drums

She trained at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música. What she does with that training is layer voices over the palos and the folkloric drum patterns, which sits a long way from where a conservatory education usually leads.

Atabey, her debut EP, arrived at the end of 2013 and takes its name from the Taíno mother goddess. Ninfa de las Aguas, Congo, Embeleso, Telaraña, Aire Libertad and Pal’ Cielo are on it. Los Tambores followed as a single in 2015 — the drums, named plainly.

The record carried her onto festival stages, which is where this kind of work finds its audience: not on Dominican commercial radio, which has no slot for it, but in front of people who came to listen.