After a few songs, he slides on a thumbpick and a fingerpick, and straps on his steel-string acoustic to acquire the signature, chiming sound of today’s bachata hit parade. Before the set ends, Paredes reaches for his newest love—a small accordion—for a bracing merengue typico that draws a few dancing couples to the small space between the tables. In all, the night provides a first class survey of classic Dominican pop—and all for the price of a Presidente beer.

“The guitar is my life and my heart,” says Paredes. “It is inseparable from me.”

Paredes was born in 1945, near San Francisco de Macoris in the north of his island homeland. His life in music began when, at the age of four or five, he walked into a bodega and laid eyes on a tres—a guitar variant with three courses of paired strings. Paredes drew attention as the young boy capable of picking out popular meringues without any guidance or instruction. His nascent career nearly ended the day he broke a string, and the bodega owner became enraged. Paredes ran from the shop vowing never to touch an instrument again. Luckily, a local bandleader later paid to have the tres restored, and he put Paredes to work. Paredes began gigging at age nine, soon switching to guitar, and forming his own group with the bandleader’s nephew, future bachata star Ramón Cordero. Paredes moved to the capital, Santo Domingo, at 13, and was soon rubbing shoulders with the pioneers of bachata music.

“Both tres and guitar were equally traditional,” he says. “The tres was used for playing son, and the guitar was used more for playing bolero—Domincan bolero, which became bachata.” 

Musically, bolero and bachata are counted in four, contrasting with the clave feel of son, and the distinctive, fast, 5-beat figure that defines merengue. Paredes came of age during the military dictatorship of Raphael Trujilo, who aggressively promoted merengue as the national music. But after Trujilo was assassinated in 1960, Paredes says, “There was an explosion of popularity of guitar bachata. It became more popular, in fact, than the orchestral merengue.” 

But this took time. The word bachata—referring to an informal house party—was originally used to disparage the music as the entertainment of “low-level soldiers and police and prostitutes and delinquents.”

“You had to go to ‘cabarets,’ which were combination bars and brothels, to hear it performed,” explains Paredes. “People listening to the music at home would play it softly, because they didn’t want their neighbors to know they were listening to bachata.”

Bachata’s stigma began to lift in the early ’80s, and, as bachata took its place in the mainstream of Domincan pop, Paredes began performing in New York. He moved there permanently in 1988. 

Bachata and Paredes are now reaching a wider audience thanks to two recent CD releases on IASO Records. Bachata Roja, Acoustic Bachata from the Cabaret Era compiles 14 classic tracks, including Paredes’ collaborations with Ramón Cordero and Marino Perez—two of the most enduring vocalists of early bachata. Dominican musicians of this era are a tight-knit group, and, recently, some of them reunited to record a brilliant set of sons, meringues, and bachatas with veteran Dominican singer Puerto Plata. The result, Mujer de Cabaret, showcases Paredes’ lead guitar on six tracks. If you can’t make Paredes’ gig in Washington Heights, you need only listen to him tearing into the blistering solo on Plata’s “Dolorita” to understand why he’s so beloved and respected by those in the know about Dominican music.