Fernando Echavarría — born Fernando Arturo Echavarría Acosta on 14 August 1953 in Santo Domingo, died 11 October 2015 — was a Dominican singer, composer and bandleader, the creator of «fusón», a homegrown Dominican fusion style built on a merengue base.

A musical household

He was the son of the musician, composer, producer and comedian Babín Echavarría, and grew up between the Santo Domingo neighborhoods of San Carlos, San Juan Bosco and Gazcue.

«La Familia André» and «fusón»

In the early 1980s he founded «La Familia André» and, with it, the genre he named fusón: Afro-Antillean rhythms such as samba and cumbia layered with jazz and rock, held together by an underlying merengue pulse. «Pato robao», «Marcela» and «Donde e’ que e’» were among the group’s biggest hits; «Marcela» later opened Henry García’s debut album with his own orchestra.

An influence, and a career in Colombia

Chichi Peralta played percussion in La Familia André for seven years before forming his own group, Son Familia, and the DR Jazz Festival credits fusón’s blend of rhythms as an early influence on the fusion strain of Dominican music that later ran through acts such as Juan Luis Guerra 4.40 and, in Colombia, Carlos Vives. Echavarría’s own songs found a particularly large audience in Colombia, where several became standards of popular music.

Recognition

In 2006 Colombia’s Premios Luna paid him tribute as the international artist with the greatest influence on Colombian music over the previous two decades; in 2008 the Premios Casandra gave him its Honor al Mérito for a career already past twenty-five years; and in 2011 the state bank Banreservas declared him a Reserva Musical Nacional.

Legacy

He died on 11 October 2015, at sixty-two, arriving at a Santo Domingo venue to perform. Weeks later, Colombia’s Premios Luna paid him a posthumous tribute, closing the circle of a career that had carried a homegrown Dominican fusion sound further afield than almost any of its time.