Junior Cabrera, born Milton Cabrera in La Romana, is a Dominican arranger, producer, composer and pianist. He founded Alfareros in 1995 and has directed it ever since, he spent fourteen years writing merengue arrangements for the biggest orchestras in the country, and since 2020 he has run 10 Preguntas, the largest interview archive Dominican popular music has.

Early years and formation

He began on the tambora and studied music formally afterwards. He was at the Universidad de Beckley when he decided music was his vocation, and he came home.

Around 1990 he put together La Súper Banda de Junior Cabrera, with Dámaso Castillo singing. That is the missing half-decade: he was running a working dance band in La Romana before he founded anything in church, and it is why the arranging came to him already finished when Alfareros started.

Alfareros

The group was formed in 1995 at the San Pablo church in La Romana. On his return Cabrera put together a quartet with four young people of the parish — Dinorah Rodríguez, Josefina Martínez, Luis M. Julián and Fermín Amador — to give a Corpus Christi mass something livelier than the usual music.

Fermín Amador is still one of its lead voices three decades later. Cabrera writes the arrangements, composes part of the repertoire and directs it.

Alfareros is the only Dominican act to have won the Latin Grammy for Best Christian Album in Spanish, taken in 2018 for Setenta veces siete. Eleven albums have come out of the group between Un Canto Nuevo in 1996 and the live Bienvenido a casa in 2021.

The commercial arranger

He dates that career himself: between 1995 and 2009 he worked as a commercial arranger in the Dominican Republic. The clients were the top of merengue — Eddy Herrera, Fernando Villalona, Héctor Acosta, Sergio Vargas and Pepe Suazo among them.

What his name is attached to is the brass: the trumpets and saxophones that answer the tambora, and the mambos built on them. In 2020 he gathered his own ten favourites from that period into a single video and walked through each one.

He numbers the arrangements in public. Un Par de Locos, written by Marie Lauret for Sergio Vargas’s album De Todo Un Poco, he announced as his thirteenth for that singer — arrangement, keyboards, programming, direction, recording and piano all his. Si No Era Yo, for Eddy Herrera, he numbered as his twenty-fourth.

He returned to the desk in 2026 for Wilfrido Vargas’s new material, sharing the production and arrangement credits with Alex Mansilla and Ronny Cruz.

10 Preguntas

By 2022 the Dominican press was describing him as the musician who had become a YouTuber. The format is in the title: he sits a musician down and asks ten questions about the work rather than about their private life. Episodes run past an hour and the channel holds more than four thousand videos.

The guests are the people who made the music and, often, the ones nobody else asks — arrangers, pianists, bassists, percussionists. Ramón Orlando explained on it how A Lo Maco was written. Milly Quezada, Maridalia Hernández, Bonny Cepeda and Los Kenton have sat for it; Jura Valoy talked about carrying a musical surname, and Krisspy about being told he could not sing típico.

The programme has since grown round tables on the state of the business. Premios Soberano nominated it for Digital Programme in 2025.

The arguments

Between episodes he publishes musical anniversaries — the day a record came out, how a song was written, who played on it — and rankings that get argued over: the ten best merengue arrangers, the best orchestras, the best intros, the best voices. He and Henry García have both named Héctor Acosta the finest interpreter of the genre.

He refuses the idea that merengue is in crisis, and points instead at the absence of any policy to sustain it. On Dominican television he has put it another way: music is a snapshot of the state a society is in.