Pirou is the stage name of Katherine Pérez, a Dominican jazz singer and songwriter from Santo Domingo. She describes her own sound as retro soul meeting a Latin heart, and she is one of very few women working the Dominican jazz circuit as a leader rather than a guest.

Theatre first

She started as an actress, and it was in the theatre that she got classical vocal training. That order matters: a singer who learns to project a character before she learns to sell a song tends to sing lyrics as text rather than as melody, and that is audible in everything she does.

She went back to studying later, in a Berklee summer programme. Dominican popular music is overwhelmingly made by people who taught themselves because there was no other option; she trained twice, deliberately, years apart.

She is also a psychologist and a working voiceover artist — one of the voices a Dominican hears from a telecoms company without ever knowing whose it is. Jazz singing does not pay a rent in Santo Domingo and she has never pretended otherwise.

The original songs

Her debut single arrived in 2019 and the run since has been steady: Admiración, Nadie Como Tú, Dime Que Sí, Besos y Violetas, Fantasías, Ser Tu Amiga, Pecado, Cerca del Sol, and Mi Cuerpo Arde, which she then cut again as a salsa.

Besito de Algodón was made with Cruzmonty. And she is on Amargue Sessions, the record that put bolero and jazz in the same room, singing a version of Voy A Apagar La Luz with Xiomara Fortuna — which is a considerable room to be invited into.

How High The Moon

Her first jazz album came out on International Jazz Day and it is five standards: Honeysuckle Rose, I Got Rhythm, The Shadow Of Your Smile, Lullaby Of Birdland and the title track.

Recording standards is the least fashionable and most exposing thing a singer can do. Every one of those five has been definitively sung by somebody famous, the arrangements are common property, and there is nowhere to hide — no production, no hook, just a voice, a guitar, a bass and a set of brushes.

She made it with a guitar trio led by the Argentine guitarist Sebastián Murena, who lives and works in the Dominican Republic, with Hidekel Martínez on drums and Marcos Asencio on double bass. They took it to the Santo Domingo Jazz Festival as a quartet under the title All That Jazz.

The circuit

Dominican jazz runs on a small number of rooms — a theatre house, a cigar club, a Thursday residency, a Christmas festival in Santiago — and on the handful of people who keep booking them. She has played that circuit for years and is now on the bills as the name rather than the guest.

It is a scene the country barely documents. There is one blog that has been writing about it since 2006, and without it most of what is known about a Dominican jazz musician’s career would not be known at all.