Víctor Irizarry is a Dominican singer, bass player and orchestra leader from La Romana. He was one of the successful merengue names of the seventies and eighties, and La Soga is the record he is remembered by.

The bass player who took the microphone

He began where bass players begin, at the back. What the Dominican writers who have gone back over his career keep saying is that he refused to stay there: he took on running his own orchestra and singing lead at the same time, which is two jobs that pull in opposite directions.

A bandleader who sings has to hear the whole arrangement from inside his own vocal line. A bass player who sings has it harder still, because the bass is the part that cannot drift. One Dominican page calls him the golden bass and the untameable voice, and the compliment is really about doing both at once.

La Soga

The song landed in 1974 and the same page calls it an earthquake. Merengue at that moment was moving from the dance halls into a national commercial music, and a record that caught in that year caught everywhere.

An album followed under his own name, then La Nueva Fuerza in 1976. He had been working out of New York — his orchestra’s LP came out on Teca Records there, and collectors file it as a mix of salsa and merengue — and he brought the band back to the Dominican Republic at the head of it.

Two genres at once

He is a figure in salsa as well. Pruebe y Compare Mi Salsa came out in 1978, between the merengue records, and the New York LP sits in salsa collections rather than merengue ones.

It was not unusual for a Dominican bandleader working the New York circuit in those years. The same players covered both, the same audience danced to both, and the distinction mattered more to record shops than to anybody in the room.

Later records

Sabor… y Merengue and Y Seguirá Con Eso…? both came in 1982. His catalogue has since been reissued digitally, and La Soga still circulates.

He is one of those artists whose name survives among people who were there and among collectors, and barely anywhere else. There is no published date of birth for him.