Eddie Bastián, billed as Eddy and known as "El Único," was a Dominican singer, percussionist, composer and bandleader, born on September 3, 1936 in Guaymate, La Romana. He emigrated to New York in 1962 and became one of the first Dominicans to work inside the city’s salsa scene, leading his own orchestra — the Swinging Band — through a run of records in the early 1970s and running his own label to release them.

Guaymate to New York

Bastián came from Guaymate, a rural district of La Romana in the sugar country of the Dominican east, and arrived in New York on October 21, 1962, at twenty-six. He entered the business from the back of the bandstand, singing coro with the orchestras of Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez — the two dominant Latin bandleaders in the city at that moment — before striking out on his own. He was working in New York in the same years Johnny Pacheco was building what became Fania, in a scene where Dominicans were far less visible than Puerto Ricans and Cubans.

His earliest documented recording is the single «Mi Ritmo», backed with «Desengaño», released by Eduardo Bastian y su Orquesta on the Dominican label Disqueya Records and dated to 1966 in the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute’s archive of Dominican music in the United States. The same archive holds a 1969 photograph of him with Normandía Maldonado and her Centro Cultural Ballet Quisqueya, founded in 1967 and among the first formal Dominican cultural institutions in New York — placing him inside the community’s organized cultural life, not only its dance halls.

The Swinging Band

His debut album, Hippies Boogaloo, appeared on Hope Records in 1971. It is a record of its exact moment — a cha-cha opener in «Echa Pa Ca», a funk-driven title track, boleros, and a guaguancó of his own called «Eddie’s Guaguancó» — and it was built from his own compositions, arranged by the Dominican trumpeters Héctor De León and Emilio Aracena.

The same year he launched EBC Records, an imprint whose initials and catalogue numbering (EBC-500, then 501) mark it as his own operation, and issued Salsa Con Sabooooor on it, again largely from his own pen. He is credited there as leader and co-producer alongside Eric Mendez, and the coro was sung by Adalberto Santiago and Yayo "El Indio," two of the most in-demand voices in New York Latin music at the time. A 1973 single followed on Epic, arranged by Guillermo Hedgill. Running a label and drawing personnel of that calibre says more about his standing than the thinness of his press coverage suggests.

The records

His catalog is small and concentrated in a few years:

• «Mi Ritmo» / «Desengaño» — single, Disqueya Records, dated 1966,

• Hippies Boogaloo — Hope Records, 1971, his debut album,

• Salsa Con Sabooooor — EBC Records, 1971,

• «Rumberos De Panamá» / «Vuelve Otra Vez» — single, Epic, 1973,

• and En Órbita De Nuevo — EBC Records, a later collection drawing on the earlier sessions, carrying «Rumbero De Oriente», «Arrea Buey», «El Cachimbo Prendió» and «Me Encantan Las Puertorriqueñas».

«Arrea Buey» has had the longest afterlife, resurfacing on reissue compilations of 1970s orchestra salsa decades later.

Return and retirement

Bastián returned to the Dominican Republic in 2018, gave interviews, and spoke about assembling a new orchestra. It never came together, and he retired from performing.

Legacy

Bastián belongs to a layer of Dominican music history that is easy to lose: the musicians who took the genre on in New York before there was a recognized Dominican presence in it. He is remembered as among the first Dominicans working salsa in the city, and he did it as a bandleader and composer rather than as a hired sideman — writing the material, fronting the band, and putting out the records himself when no label would.

That story is usually told through one or two famous names. Bastián is the evidence of its wider layer — a Dominican bandleader from Guaymate with an Epic single, his own imprint and Fania-calibre singers on his choruses, whose records now sit in a university archive precisely because they document how Dominican music actually lived in the United States.