Juan Bienvenido Severino Soriano, who records as Joan Soriano and is billed as El Duque de la Bachata, is a Dominican bachata guitarist and singer. Since the nineteen-eighties his guitar and his arrangements have appeared on other people’s bachata hits, and since 2008 he has been recording under his own name for audiences outside the country.

A guitar made from fishing line

He was born on 23 February 1972 in Monte Plata, in the countryside outside Santo Domingo. He had little schooling and spent his childhood helping his father work the family’s land. His first guitar he made himself, out of fishing line and a discarded metal box.

He and his brothers and sisters put together a family band, known as Los Candes after their father Candelario, and it became a fixture at events around the neighbourhood. At thirteen he hitched a ride to Santo Domingo and began working as a session musician alongside the established names of the genre. He was twenty years into that work before anyone recorded him under his own name.

Palo and gagá

He plays palo and gagá, the Afro-Dominican sacred traditions, and brings their rhythmic base into his bachata, which is what dancers respond to in his records. He plays steel strings, and the sound is closer to the acoustic bachata of the sixties than to the guitar tone the genre adopted after it went electric.

El Duque de la Bachata

His first international release came in September 2010 on iASO Records. El Duque de la Bachata was recorded live in studios in Santo Domingo and New York by the producer Benjamin de Menil, spent weeks inside the top ten of Billboard’s Tropical Albums chart and took the world beat album award from the Indie Acoustic Project. Before it he had released Joan Soriano aka El Duque en Pampers, Vocales de Amor and Afro Bachata, and appeared on the Rough Guide to Bachata compilation.

Bachata Breakdown

In 2011 he made Bachata Breakdown En Vivo with Aventura and Monchy & Alexandra. It is a video and record that take the music apart instrument by instrument across its three rhythms — derecho, majao and mambo — which is an unusual thing for working musicians to sit down and do.

La Familia Soriano followed in April 2012, made with his siblings Nelly, Griselda and Fernando, and entered the Billboard Tropical Albums chart at number three. He has since re-formed the family band with Fernando and Griselda.

Bachata Haití

In 2018 he led Bachata Haití, the first bachata recorded in Creole. The songs are sung in Creole and in Spanish by a group of Haitian-Dominican musicians, and the record was conceived as a counterweight to coverage that treats the relationship between the two countries only as a conflict.

On film and on the road

He is the subject of Adam Taub’s documentary The Duke of Bachata, from 2009, and appears in Alex Wolfe’s Santo Domingo Blues. He has toured across the United States and Europe, and formed The Bachata Legends with Ramón Cordero and Edilio Paredes to carry the older acoustic style abroad.