Daniel Checo, born Héctor Daniel Checo Gómez, is a Dominican singer, songwriter and record producer from Santiago. He records under his own name and produces under another one, DjDani Prod, and the second half of that is the larger part of what he does.

Villa Verde

He grew up in Villa Verde, a barrio of Santiago, and the music arrived early: at thirteen he was making rap tracks, which in a Dominican barrio in the late two-thousands meant a computer, whatever software could be got hold of, and time.

Producing before performing is a common enough route and it leaves a mark on everything that follows. Someone who learns the craft from behind the screen tends to think about a record as a thing to be assembled rather than a thing to be sung, and hears the arrangement before the melody.

De Cero a Millonario

What turned it into work was running into a childhood friend, Alexander Céspedes, who records as Alex Grey. The two of them set about equipping a room properly, and out of that came a company called De Cero a Millonario and a studio called DCM Studios.

The name is the whole ambition stated out loud, and it is also the imprint line at the bottom of every one of his releases. He gives his own occupation as singer and music producer at DCM, which is the accurate description: the studio is the business and the singles are one of the things it makes.

That model — a small independent studio in a provincial city, releasing its own artists and taking bookings through a separate agency — is how a very large share of Dominican music now actually gets made, and almost none of it is written down anywhere.

The singles

Mi Felicidad came first, with a video shot by Black-Multimedia Films and the musical production credited to his own studio. Especial followed a couple of months later, then Hey, which is his reading of a Dejota2021 song rather than an original, then Hola with the Puerto Rican engineer and singer Johanzi, and then Angelita & Diablita with Enmanuel Paredes.

They are romantic urban records, and the tags he attached to the last of them name Ozuna, Bad Bunny and Daddy Yankee — which says plainly enough what he was aiming at. Five singles is a small body of work, and it is a real one: each has a video, a release, an imprint and a booking line behind it.

Two names on the same records

The follow handle on his earliest videos is the producer one and the follow handle on the later ones is the singer one, which is a small thing that tells you where the centre of gravity moved. He is easier to find as DjDani Prod than as Daniel Checo, and the two are the same person doing two halves of one job.