Ala Jaza is the stage name of Enmanuel Jiménez, a Dominican singer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and producer born in Santo Domingo in 1987. He is the architect of MamWali, a merengue built on trap and urban production that gave the genre one of its few genuinely new shapes of the 2010s, and the run of records he made around it won him three Premios Soberano in a single night in 2019.

Early years and New York

Jiménez grew up in Villas Agrícolas before the family moved to the countryside around Jarabacoa when he was eight, and on to New York a couple of years after that. Music came from his father, the singer Rafael Cabrera, who put a tambora in front of him early and pushed him to study. By thirteen he was working the New York bachata and merengue circuit as a bass player, young enough that the scene gave him a nickname for it — "Rompe Plantica," the kid who could outplay the adults.

That apprenticeship left him a genuine multi-instrumentalist rather than a frontman who happens to own a band. Bass remains his instrument, but he also plays guitar, piano, tambora, güira, congas and timbales, and he arranges and produces his own material — which is the practical reason MamWali could be invented from inside the music rather than ordered from a studio.

Óptimo and the solo project

He first recorded as part of the group Óptimo before going out under his own name. The solo project started in New York but did not catch until he brought it back to Santo Domingo, where «El Cacao» gave him his first real traction on Dominican radio. From there the pace picked up quickly: «No se vale» and «Twerk It» both landed in 2016, and by the following year he was releasing albums faster than most of his contemporaries.

MamWali

MamWali is Jiménez’s own coinage for the style he assembled out of merengue and trap, with mambo, salsa and hip-hop pulled in around the edges. The idea surfaced gradually across his mid-2010s singles and arrived fully formed with «Banda» in 2017 — the record where the trap low end and the merengue tempo stopped sounding like two things stitched together. The Dominican press took to calling him the "Rey del Merengue Electrónico," and he built an album around the style outright with La Escuela del Mamwali.

Records and recognition

His catalog runs from the mid-2010s to the present:

• 2k17 (En Vivo), Unplugged and La Escuela del Mamwali — three albums released across 2017,

• Mamwali, Vol. 2 and Historias — the later full-length projects,

• «El Cacao», «Banda», «No se vale», «Twerk It», «Nadie se meta», «Te soñé», «Corazón en soledad», «Si no me amas», «Baila baila baila» and «Dos locos»,

• and «Mi forma de ser», his collaboration with the Puerto Rican artist Farruko, released in a mambo version in 2018.

At the 2019 Premios Soberano he took three awards in the merengue categories, including collaboration of the year for «Mi forma de ser» — and went home to Jarabacoa, the town he grew up near, to celebrate.

Legacy

Ala Jaza belongs to the generation that had to answer a hard question for Dominican music: what merengue does once dembow and trap own the street. His answer was neither to defend the traditional orchestra nor to abandon merengue for urban music, but to rebuild the genre around the production language young listeners were already using — and to do it as a working musician who could play every instrument in the argument.

Whether MamWali outlasts him as a named style is still an open question; he is mid-career and still recording. What is already clear is that he kept merengue in the conversation during a decade when it was widely assumed to be losing one.