Juan Francisco Ordóñez is a Dominican guitarist, composer and arranger, born in Santo Domingo on 4 October 1961. He has spent his career inside other people’s projects at the moment those projects were inventing something: Luis "Terror" Días’s «Transporte Urbano», where Dominican rock is generally said to begin; the trio behind Sonia Silvestre when she was making tecnoamargue; and the records of Víctor Víctor. He is credited with changing what the guitar does in Dominican music.

Learning

Ordóñez was born in the San Carlos barrio, son of José Ordóñez García and Crisanta González, Asturian immigrants. He was schooled at the Colegio Dominicano De La Salle and took a degree in economics at the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo. He started the guitar at eleven with Blas Carrasco and carried on alone; Sonia de Piña taught him to read music. In 1976 and 1977 he was in «Convite», less a band than a research project with instruments, which went looking for rhythms that had survived in corners of the island without ever reaching a studio.

The rock that did not exist

Luis "Terror" Días came back from New York in 1982 with punk in his ears and «Convite»’s fieldwork behind him, and assembled «Transporte Urbano»: Ordóñez on electric guitar, Guy Frómeta on drums, Héctor Santana on bass — later Peter Nova — Bruno Ranson on saxophone and Duluc on percussion. The band is treated as the beginning of Dominican rock, not because Dominicans were playing rock but because this rock was built out of merengue, bachata, mangulina, salve and dozens of other Dominican and Haitian rhythms. Within a few years it had contracted to a power trio, which put most of the weight on the guitar. It never played anyone else’s songs.

They played the amphitheatre at Altos de Chavón in February 1983 with Bob James, and again that April with «The English Beat». In 1984 they scored the short «Las pausas del silencio» alongside Juan Luis Guerra 4.40, Maridalia Hernández and Tavito Vásquez, and the music took best soundtrack at the Philadelphia international film festival. The LP they cut at Audiolab in 1985 sat unreleased for want of money until 2000, when it appeared as «Vickiana: las sesiones del 1985». At the «Varadero» festival in Cuba in April 1987 the band’s volume and stage manner were judged improper by some authorities and its members were invited to leave the country the day after they played; the Cuban youth press took their side, and Pablo Milanés said so publicly. Ordóñez stayed close to twenty-five years, until Luis "Terror" Días’s band wound up in 2004.

Tecnoamargue

He worked in trios alongside all of that. «OFS», with Frómeta and Héctor Santana, went to Peru in 1986 for the «Festival de la Nueva Canción Latinoamericana» and to Montreal that June for the «Carnaval du Soleil», with the singer Patricia Pereyra. «Trilogía», with Santana and the percussionist Chichi Peralta, became the band that toured Sonia Silvestre’s «Yo quiero andar» — the record that moved her into bachata and gave her the widest audience of her career — and it was in that work that tecnoamargue, the style built on the bachatas of Luis "Terror" Días, came of age.

His own records

«Trilogía» was issued on cassette in 1988 and on CD in 2004. «Cabaret Azul», made with Patricia Pereyra in 1989 and reissued in 2002, was placed on «ACROARTE»’s hundred essential albums of Dominican music in 2013. «Radio Recuerdo» followed in 2001 and «El Trío Vol. 1» in 2019; by then the «Ordóñez Trío» had opened the sixteenth «DR Jazz Festival», in November 2012, on a bill with Pancho Amat and Pedro Guzmán.

Behind other people

In 2005 he co-produced, arranged and played on Víctor Víctor’s «Bachata entre amigos», which put songs by Joaquín Sabina, Joan Manuel Serrat, Silvio Rodríguez, Pablo Milanés, Pedro Guerra and Fito Páez into bachata as duets with their authors. He went on to direct «La Vellonera», the group that backed Víctor Víctor on stage until the singer died in 2020. He has written for film — the short «Frente al mar», from Hilma Contreras’s story, and León Ichaso’s «Azúcar amarga» — and worked as a session guitarist in the Dominican Republic, Latin America and Spain.

Legacy

Ordóñez has played jam sessions with Paquito D’Rivera, Charlie Haden and Don Cherry, and has taught several generations of Dominican guitarists. His playing is on the founding record of Dominican rock, on the record where tecnoamargue came of age, and on the one that carried bachata to a roomful of Iberoamerican songwriters — in each case as the guitarist rather than the author.