Marco Hernández is a Dominican producer, arranger, composer, pianist and vocalist from Santo Domingo. He spent twelve years inside Juan Luis Guerra 4.40, and he has since won the Latin Grammy twice and the American Grammy once as a producer.

A house with a piano in it

He comes from a family of musicians. His mother was a classical pianist and a professor at the national conservatory, which meant the instrument and the discipline were both in the house before he chose either.

As a teenager and a young man in Santo Domingo he was the musical director, pianist and vocalist of two popular rock bands — not the merengue apprenticeship the rest of his generation served. He then won a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he specialised in piano.

Twelve years in 4.40

He joined Juan Luis Guerra’s group in 1987 and stayed twelve years, as a backing vocalist, a singer and a musician, and he was central to how the group’s voices were arranged.

The vocal stack is what made 4.40 sound like nothing else in the Caribbean — four voices treated as one instrument, closer to a jazz vocal group than to a merengue chorus. Somebody had to build those parts, and he was inside that room for the whole of the band’s decisive decade.

The other side of the glass

He issued his first solo album, Que Hable la Música, in 2000, and moved steadily onto the production side. His first Latin Grammy as a producer came in 2005.

In 2008 he produced Señor Bachata for José Feliciano, and that record brought him a second Latin Grammy and an American Grammy. A Dominican producing a Puerto Rican legend’s bachata album, and winning on both sides of the border with it, is a particular kind of credential.

He was preparing Héctor Aníbal’s return around the same time, and he has since said he wants to write for film.

FincaFusion

He now works out of Miami through Sabordin Music Productions and leads Grupo FincaFusion, a project he has described as a combination of everything a working lifetime put in front of him.

That is the shape of the whole career: a rock musician who learned classical piano at home, trained in Boston, sang in the most important merengue group the country has produced, and ended up behind the board making other people’s records win.