There is a story that most people have never heard about Dominican music. Everyone knows merengue. Everyone knows bachata. But underneath those two global hits lies a vast landscape of Afro-Dominican traditions — Palo drums, the sacred salve song form, the Sarandunga of Baní, the interlocking congo rhythms of Villa Mella — that draw directly from the country’s African ancestry and predate the music most people associate with the Dominican Republic. Yasser Tejeda has spent his entire career excavating that landscape, and bringing it to audiences who didn’t know it existed.
Yasser Tejeda in NYC
Tejeda is based in Brooklyn, so he is around.
AUGUST 2026
Yasser Tejeda ~ Mezclansa Live
Afro-Dominican Alternative plays the album that made him famous
Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater
Fri, Aug 14 at 9:30pm
$30
This August date is built around Mezclansa — the Tejeda album that Acroarte named one of the 100 essential recordings of Dominican music. A full live performance of that album, in this venue, is a significant cultural event for the Dominican community in New York and for anyone who cares about the depth of what Dominican music actually contains.
JUNE 2026
Yasser Tejeda & Marcos J. López 🇩🇴 🇵🇷
New York Music Month ~ Young Masters Concert
Afro-Dominican Alternative & Afro-Puerto Rican Jazz
National Sawdust; Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Fri, June 26 @ 7pm
FREE with RSVP
The concert is part of National Sawdust’s Young Masters series — a platform honoring artists who have achieved exceptional mastery early in their careers — in partnership with Parcha Projects, a NYC- and Puerto Rico–based discovery platform championing artists from the Caribbean.
Yasser Tejeda ~ Acoustic Tribute to Luis “El Terror” Días 🇩🇴
Afro-Dominican Alternative artist’s tribute to his mentor
Ki Smith Gallery, Lower East Side
Thu, June 18, 6:30pm
$28
Luis Días (1952–2009) was one of the most important figures in Dominican alternative and roots music — a guitarist, composer, and cultural activist who, along with Xiomara Fortuna and Tony Vicioso, defined the Dominican roots renaissance of the 1980s and ’90s. Tejeda worked with Días before moving to New York, and this tribute is a deeply personal and historically significant event.
Kíko ~ This is blowing my mind a little bit. I was born and raised in Afro-Latin neighborhoods in the States, but never thought much about it. The Cuban Yoruba orishas began revealing themselves to me on my last day in New York on my way to live in Puerto Rico. In PR, I asked Yemayá, the great mother of the sea, if I should stay in my cool apartment. I went to the sea to receive her answer, but collapsed as soon as I touched the water. I tore my Achilles tendon and couldn’t walk for a year. She kept me in Puerto Rico where I studied bomba drumming, plena singing, and salsa dancing. That changed me.
Years later, I moved on to the next island, the Dominican Republic to see what was there. Staying in the Colonial Zone near the 500 year-old trees in front of the oldest cathedral of the Americas, I lit a candle for La Altagracia, patron saint of the Dominican Republic. Most Catholic saints have an African pair. I looked for Altagracia’s pair and found the Dikenga cosmological diagram of Central Africa’s traditional Kongo religion, and the Kalûnga line which separates the worlds of the living and the ancestors.
Computer use is tracked, so I tried to retrace my steps from La Altagracia to Kongo, but couldn’t find any trace. It was as if an invisible hand led me. While reading Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces I came across a diagram representing the psychological journey through life which is exactly the same as the Dikenga diagram. Then I got hired to promote Dominican singer Xiomara Fortuna whose latest work was all about the Kalûnga. So in one week, something I never heard of showed up powerfully three times. Three years later, I have a little better understanding of Dominican Palo, 21 Divisiones, and all that. A lot of it is rooted in the Kongo traditions I discovered that day. And here is Xiomara again through Yasser. ¡Ay Dios!
MAY 2026
Yasser Tejeda & Palotré 🇩🇴
Latin Alternative with Afro-Dominican roots
Bar LunÀtico; Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn
Fri, May 22, 9-11:30pm
$10 suggested donation
Yasser Tejeda
Born and raised in Santo Domingo and based in Brooklyn since 2013, Tejeda is a composer, guitarist, vocalist, and producer. He performs with his band Palotré. He “passionately advocates for new generations to explore, promote, and enrich their cultural heritage.” He sees his work as uncovering what he calls the hidden treasure — the other Dominican Republic, the one that belongs to the Afro-Caribbean traditions the country’s mainstream music culture has historically looked past.
Kíko ~ A little context. I’m an American who has lived in the Dominican Republic for years. Most Dominicans deny their Afro-Indigenous heritage ~ even when it is obvious. Many consider themselves Spaniards and don’t want anything to do with Afro-Indigenous roots. When I talk about African Diasporic religions, I am regularly accused of being a demon, a witch, or a gangster. So Tejeda is brave, but he is also right. Dominican folk traditions are just as rich as merengue, bachata, and dembow, all of which are rooted in the folk traditions. And even though many Dominicans reject it, if you play Palo music (the main Afro-Dominican folk religion), many Dominicans just start singing and dancing naturally. It’s in the blood.
According to Billboard, Tejeda gives traditional folkloric music “a frenzied celebration of ancestral union,” fusing jazz, rock, and Caribbean rhythms with Afro-Dominican roots. His guitar work draws on the intricate picking tradition of bachata’s folk origins — not the romanticized urban version, but the rural guitar style rooted directly in the polyrhythms of Africa — and combines it with jazz harmonics, hard rock textures, and the driving rhythm of merengue.
His NPR feature (npr.org, June 2023) describes how he takes traditional bachata guitar chords and “throws in some jazz now and then” while playing over a fast merengue beat — a deeply thought-out hybrid that is, as NPR’s Felix Contreras put it, “expertly performed and very danceable.”
Tejeda has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Apollo Music Café in Harlem, and sold-out shows at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan. He appeared as a guest artist at the 2024 Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, D.C., honoring Arturo Sandoval. His music has been included in the curriculum at UCLA, Fordham University, Rutgers, and Princeton University.
Juan Luis Guerra, the most influential Dominican artist in the world, has called Tejeda’s work “a marvelous example of what’s happening with Dominican music.” Guerra is Berklee College of Music. He basically polished up merengue and sold it to the world. That’s why he is the most famous Dominican musician in the world.
His band Palotré is built for this music. The current lineup is Yasser Tejeda on guitar and compositions, Jonathan “Jblak” Troncoso on percussion, Victor Otoniel Vargas on drums, and Kyle Miles on bass. The drum kit transforms the folk tradition into Latin Alternative.
Tejeda is currently playing in Broadway’s Buena Vista Social Club band. Though a Cuban story, Tejeda’s presence is not a stretch. Son Cubano derived from changüi in Eastern Cuba, which derived from the Haitian Diaspora on Tejeda’s home island.
Tejeda Albums
Mezclansa (2009)
Tejeda’s debut album was named one of the 100 essential recordings of Dominican music by Acroarte — the Dominican National Association of Art Writers.
Kijombo (2019)
His second album received six awards from the Dominican Republic’s Premios Indie, including Best Album. The album’s liner notes describe drawing “a trans-Atlantic line between the Dominican congo rhythm and the snaking figures of Congolese guitar” — one of the most direct statements of the African-Dominican connection at the heart of his work.
The album title comes from the word quijombo, referring to the gathering where palos drums are played: a place where the mystical and the musical intersect, where family and friends come to drink rum, dance, and sing in cultural resistance. It’s a Bantu Central African word for a fortified settlement. In the Americas that’s where free African descendents created their own towns. In Brazil, it’s a quilombo. In Colombia, it’s a palenque. In Brooklyn, it’s Weeksville. These free towns are all over the Americas.
La Madrugá (2023)
Tejeda’s third studio album (The Dawn) earned a nomination for Best Alternative Artist at the Premios Soberano and seven nominations for the Premios Indie in the Dominican Republic.
His inspiration, as described at gazette.gibson.com, was listening to traditional chants and genres rooted in the Dominican Republic’s African ancestry — Los Congos del Espíritu Santo de Villa Mella, La Sarandunga de Baní, La Salve de San Cristóbal — and implementing them into an experimental fusion of merengue, jazz, and rock.
LOL. I’ve been searching the Dominican Republic for what Tejeda does in NYC, and he sings about all my saints. ¡Foforó Elegba!
More Info
Original coverage was sponsored by Harlem Stage.