Dominic, born Domingo Isaías Díaz, was a Dominican salsa singer. He worked the romantic salsa circuit out of New York in the late nineties and two thousands, and he was billed as the sublime voice of salsa, which is the sort of name a promoter gives a singer who can actually sing.

Villa Consuelo

He grew up in Villa Consuelo, one of the old working barrios of Santo Domingo — a neighbourhood that has produced a disproportionate share of Dominican musicians and that he was always associated with.

He went to New York in the nineties, which is where a Dominican salsero had to be. Salsa romántica was a New York industry by then: the arrangers, the studios, the radio and the promoters were all in the same few blocks, and the singers came from wherever they came from.

Niégalo Todo

Niégalo Todo is the record he is remembered for, and it did what a romantic salsa hit was supposed to do — it went into the rotation and stayed there. Te Esperaré and Te Deseo belong to the same run, and Lo Pasado, Pasado came out on Sky Records.

The genre he worked in has a specific shape. The songs are boleros in everything but rhythm: slow-burning, wounded, sung to one person, and then set over a salsa arrangement that turns private misery into something a room can dance to. He was very good at the first half of that, which is the half that is hard.

He belonged to a bill that was overwhelmingly Puerto Rican — the singers he shared arrangers and stages with were mostly from San Juan or the Bronx. Being the Dominican in a Puerto Rican genre is its own kind of career, and it usually means working twice for the same billing.

A short life

He died in New York in August 2020, at forty-five. The salsa pages of the Dominican diaspora carried it within a day of each other; the Dominican press barely did.

That is the shape of the whole story, really. He spent his career singing a Puerto Rican form in an American city with a Dominican passport and a Dominican barrio behind him, and he ended up slightly outside every list that gets kept. The records are still there.