Jorge Edmundo Taveras Andújar was a Dominican pianist, arranger, producer and conductor. He worked behind other people’s records and in front of television house orchestras rather than under his own name, which is why his catalogue is a list of other artists — and a long one.

Ciudad Nueva

He was born in Ciudad Nueva, Santo Domingo, in 1945, and began studying piano at the start of the fifties at the city’s elementary music school. In 1958 he joined a rock group led by Milton Peláez, and later entered the National Conservatory, where the company was serious instrumentalists.

In 1962 he took a job as pianist in the orchestra at the Hotel Europa, which was his first professional work and the room where he learned the trade. He also kept trying to become something else: he enrolled in civil engineering at the Madre y Maestra, then business administration at the Autonomous University, which he left when the April revolution of 1965 shut the country down, and then two more universities in Puerto Rico. He said afterwards that he had been through six of them trying to get a degree, and that the music kept pulling him back.

While in Puerto Rico he enrolled at its conservatory instead, and came home at the end of 1966. He learned guitar, started going to the recording studios, and stopped trying to be anything other than a musician.

Los Caballeros Montecarlo

In 1967 the executives of the tobacco company called him to Santiago to direct their band, Los Caballeros Montecarlo. He stayed eleven years, which is longer than most Dominican musicians of his generation stayed anywhere.

The house orchestras

In 1973 he joined the television programme Nosotros a las 8 as director of its house orchestra, and began producing advertising jingles alongside it. He went on to direct the house orchestras of De Noche, Punto Final and El Show del Mediodía — the programme Rafael Solano had built — and produced the Sunday show Fantástico.

He was also the man promoters called when an international artist came to play the country and needed a band that could read anything on short notice.

The productions

The records he worked on are where the career lives. He produced or arranged for Johnny Ventura, Wilfrido Vargas, Omar Franco, Olga Lara, Pochy y su Cocoband, Sonia Silvestre, José Antonio Rodríguez, Víctor Víctor, Miriam Cruz, Milly Quezada and Taty Salas, among others.

That is merengue, bachata, balada and nueva canción in the same working life, and it is why his name turns up in the credits of records that otherwise have nothing in common.

The festivals

He took the same three roles — director, arranger and composer — to the OTI song festivals held in Mexico, Brazil and Puerto Rico, and to the Onda Nueva festival that Aldemaro Romero ran in Venezuela.

He died on 3 December 2021 in Orlando, Florida, at seventy-six.