Jonatan Piña Duluc is a Dominican saxophonist, composer and arranger from Santiago de los Caballeros who has built one of the country’s most distinctive catalogues at the meeting point of jazz, Dominican folk rhythm and progressive rock.

Training

He studied saxophone at Santiago’s Instituto de Cultura y Arte and contemporary classical composition at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música, later working privately on jazz arranging with the American teacher Corey Allen. For a decade he was the house saxophonist of «Lunes de Jazz», the long-running weekly jazz night in Santiago, and played alongside Xiomara Fortuna and other Dominican and visiting musicians.

«El Trio» and «Proyecto Piña Duluc»

He first led the rock-fusion trio «El Trio», then in 2010 formed «Proyecto Piña Duluc» to bring original material blending jazz with Dominican folk rhythms — merengue, pambiche and their variants — to «Lunes de Jazz» itself, building a repertoire of more than twenty-five pieces played at the Centro León, the Dominican Republic Jazz Festival and other stages before its live debut album.

A solo catalogue

In 2017 he went solo with «Drip/Culebra», an avant-garde, Afro-Dominican chamber-jazz record praised in the UK’s Songwriting Magazine, and followed it with «Substancia» (2018), «Secuencia III, Confirmación» (2020) and «Soundtrack Vol. I: Secuencia» (2021), continuing to compose, record and mix his own music.

Awards

He has won the Premio Nacional de Música, the country’s top composition prize, six times, including in 2015 for his «Sonata para Violonchelo y Piano» in the chamber music category.

Legacy

Working from Santiago rather than the capital and building an idiom that fuses jazz with Dominican folk rhythm and progressive rock in equal measure, Jonatan Piña Duluc has become one of the most decorated composers of his generation without leaving the jazz circuit that shaped him.