Elvin R.

With a career spanning over twelve years, Elvin R. is a guitarist and composer native of the city of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Determined to enhance his musical capabilities, he currently explores every angle of music, thus developing and growing as an artist and performer.

Since his early years he has been musically inclined; at the age of 11, he taught himself how to play the guitar. He started listening to a variety of musical styles and discovering different ways to learn the most that he could from them. At the age of 14, he began taking lessons with guitar master Jacques Martines at the National Conservatory of Music in the Dominican Republic. From a very young age, he started performing around Santo Domingo and had been part of multiple groups, where played various styles that helped him expand his technique and widen his musical vocabulary; from jazz to rock and pop, to folklore and among others.

In 2006, he recorded and composed the album “Yo Te Lo Dare” with his local acclaimed group “Grado Celsius.” After graduating from the Conservatory of Music, he decides to further his education in Film Scoring and Multimedia Composition in the city of La Plata, Argentina at the EMU Music Education Institute. While in Argentina, being surrounded by musicians from around Latinamerica, Elvin was taken by the amount of opportunities to grow as a musician. Elvin found himself strongly involved in Jazz; He took classes with many acclaimed and recognized jazz artists, such as Kenny Werner, David Becker, Gary Keller, Dan Balmer, Ari Hoenig, David Liebman, Oscar Stagnaro, Scott Henderson, Rory Stuart, Pedro Ramos, and many others.

In July 2011, Elvin traveled to Sao Paulo, Brazil, where he had the great opportunity of being part of IASJ (International Association of Schools of Jazz), a meeting of the most important schools of Jazz in America and Europe. In this meeting he represented his country as well as the pleasure of playing at Paineras Theater in a sextet with other great musicians from having countries all around the world.

He graduated from EMU Music Education by the end of 2011, and returned to Santo Domingo and starts performing with “Legacy Trio,” a jazz band who only played original compositions. The following year, he was awarded with a scholarship to enter Berklee College of Music. Elvin then decided to follow his musical studies with a Jazz Composition degree. At Berklee, he collaborates with friends and peers for different projects