Jairo Frías is a Dominican Christian singer-songwriter, guitarist and producer. He is best known inside the scene not for his own records but for the ones he played on and wrote for other people: a session guitarist and songwriter whose work sits underneath a good part of the Dominican and Latin Christian catalogue.

Iglesia AD Luz y Vida

He began in the Iglesia AD Luz y Vida, where he grew up watching the church musicians play. He has said that watching them was what decided him on music. He learned guitar there, and it was the guitar rather than his voice that first took him out of the congregation and onto other people’s stages.

Hijos de Noé

Frías was lead vocalist of Hijos de Noé, which in 2008 became the first Christian band to win the Messenger Mag Festival. His first solo single, Date el Chance, followed — a song written to push young people to keep going through difficulty. It was premiered on Café a las 12, the programme on Renuevo 89.7 FM. In 2011 Armonía Producciones presented him as one of its Christian artists.

The sideman

He has played guitar for a long list of Christian artists, Dominican and foreign: Lilly Goodman, Isabelle Valdez, Marcos Yaroide, Rosa Karina, Egleyda Belliard, the Puerto Rican Danny Berríos, René González, the American Jaci Velásquez, Eddy Alba, Juampa y Lenny and Roosevelt Martínez among them.

The songs he wrote for other people

The writing credits are the more durable part of his work. He wrote Este es el Tiempo for Nancy Amancio, La Fe for José Luis Reyes, Aférrate a la Fe for Danny Berríos, and Dile a ese gigante, a duet with the Colombian Alex Campos. He wrote Otro año más for Isabelle Valdez, produced by Baruc Berroa with his own arrangement. He has also written and produced for Rosa Karina and Marcos Yaroide.

His own records

His first album, La Única Razón, he wrote and produced himself. En Dios Está mi Fe belongs to the same body of work. Revestido arrived in October 2023, executive produced with Karen Monegro; Frías wrote it, arranged it and programmed it, with Josías García on piano, Benjamín Martínez on bass, Michel Martínez on electric guitar, Fulg Capellán on acoustic guitar, Jatniel Martínez on drums and Jancel Tejeda on percussion. Freysi Frías directed the voices, Abraham Marte recorded and mixed it, and Pablo Green directed the video. In November 2023 he appeared on Yo Soy Quisqueya, the collective recording that gathered Nancy Amancio, Isabelle Valdez, Rosa Karina, Egleyda Belliard and a dozen more.