Yasser Tejeda is a Dominican guitarist, composer, singer and producer who leads the band Palotré. He works at the join between Afro-Dominican roots music and jazz, rock and the rest of the Caribbean, and he has spent his career arguing that the join is where the interesting music is.

Early years and formation

He was born and raised in Santo Domingo and trained at Berklee. Before the concert halls there were years of playing on trains and in bars, which the Dominican press has told about at some length and which he has not tried to leave out of the story.

What he took from the training is not a jazz vocabulary imposed on Dominican rhythm. It is the reverse. En El Naranjo and Amor Congo are built on the congos del espíritu santo de Villa Mella, a sacred Afro-Dominican tradition, and the jazz is what he uses to open them out.

Mezclansa

Mezclansa, his first album with Palotré, was named by Acroarte as one of the hundred essential recordings of Dominican music. The recognition was uncommon for a debut by a guitarist working outside the commercial genres, and it set the terms for everything after.

Kijombo and La Madrugá

Kijombo followed on 29 October 2019 and took six Premios Indie, Best Album among them. La Madrugá came after it, with a Soberano nomination for Best Alternative Artist in 2024 and again in 2025, and it exists in an instrumental version as well.

The records travel. He has sold out Carnegie Hall and the Apollo Music Café, played Isle of Light at home and SunFest, Latinxt and the Afro-Latino Fest abroad, and his music is taught at UCLA, Fordham, Rutgers and Princeton.

Tiny Desk, the Kennedy Center and Netflix

NPR gave him a Tiny Desk Concert in May 2024, and in December of that year he played at the Kennedy Center Honors in the band paying tribute to Arturo Sandoval.

In June 2026 three of his tracks went onto the soundtrack of Office Romance, the Netflix film with Jennifer Lopez — Todo Va A Marchar, his own, alongside his versions of Dim All the Lights and Fade Into You.

The argument

His public position is that younger Dominicans should go looking through their own inheritance rather than around it. Juan Luis Guerra has called him a marvellous example of what is happening with Dominican music, which from that quarter is close to an endorsement of the whole approach.

He belongs to the line that runs through Michel Camilo: Dominican musicians who studied abroad at the highest level and came back to the country’s own rhythms rather than away from them.