Luis Días Portorreal, universally known as Luis "El Terror" Días, was a Dominican composer, guitarist, singer and bandleader, born on June 21, 1952 in Bonao and dead on December 8, 2009 in Santo Domingo. He is the figure Dominican musicians point to when they want to argue that the country’s folklore and its rock could be the same music. More than three hundred of his compositions were recorded by other artists, he is widely called the father of Dominican rock, and in 2004 the Dominican state declared him Patrimonio Cultural de la Nación while he was still alive to hear it.

Bonao and Convite

Días grew up inside Dominican vernacular music: his father played the tres, his mother sang salves. He studied with the teachers Juan Zorrilla and Tatán Jiménez, and at sixteen formed his first group, Los Chonnys, playing rock and roll in Bonao. In 1970 he moved to Santo Domingo to read psychology at the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo.

In 1972, at the initiative of the sociologist Dagoberto Tejeda, he joined Convite as guitarist and vocalist. Convite was less a band than a research project with instruments — an effort to find, document and perform rhythms that had survived in corners of the island without ever reaching a recording studio. That fieldwork is the foundation everything else in his career was built on. Convite played the Festival Internacional de la Nueva Canción "Siete Días con el Pueblo" in 1974, where his "Obrero acepta mi mano" served as the official theme.

Madora and Transporte Urbano

He left Convite in 1978 and formed Madora with Gustavo Moré and others, beginning the experiments that fused jazz with Antillean folklore. Between 1980 and 1982 he taught Dominican music workshops at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

The decisive group was Transporte Urbano, formed in 1982 with Juan Francisco Ordóñez on guitar, Guy Frómeta on drums, José Duluc on percussion and Bruno Ranson on saxophone. It is generally treated as the birth of Dominican rock: not Dominicans playing rock, but rock built from the inside out of merengue, bachata, mangulina, salve and more than forty other Dominican and Haitian rhythms, crossed with reggae, jazz and blues. He gave the results names of his own — merenrock, tecnoamargue — and released albums including Luis "Terror" Días (1984), Merenrock (1988), El Accidente (1998), La Yola (2000), Radio Macana (2003) and Tiempo de Ocio, issued in the year he died.

The songbook

For all the experimentation, his widest reach came through other people’s voices. Among the best known:

• "Carnaval," better known as "Baila en la calle" — the 1984 Dominican carnival theme, carried by Fernando Villalona and Sonia Silvestre,

• "Marola," "Las vampiras" and "La novia" — Sergio Vargas,

• "La pringamosa" — Wilfrido Vargas,

• "Mi guachimán" and "Yo quiero andar" — Sonia Silvestre,

• "Gigante" — Alex Bueno, and "El carrito" — July Mateo "Rasputín",

• "Rocapiedra" — Los Hijos del Rey, and further recordings by Dioni Fernández y El Equipo and Kaki Vargas,

• and "Si he de morir" and "Mi barrio," recorded by Marc Anthony, the latter for the soundtrack of the film Blue in the Face.

He also worked in film. He shared the 1984 silver award for best original music at the Philadelphia International Film Festival with Juan Luis Guerra 4.40 for Las pausas del silencio, collaborated with David Byrne on soundtrack work, and scored La maldición del padre Cardona in 2005. The sessions he cut with Vickiana in 1985 were eventually released in 2000.

Recognition and controversy

His honors came steadily: a national award in 1983 for the carnival theme, participation in the XII World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow in 1985, Casandra awards as Lyricist of the Year in 1989 and Composer of the Year in 1990, and the declaration of Patrimonio Cultural de la Nación in 2004.

In 2006 the chorus of "Baila en la calle" surfaced, uncredited, in "Hips Don’t Lie" by Shakira and Wyclef Jean — a global number one built on a phrase written for a Dominican carnival two decades earlier. The episode became the most widely discussed instance of a Dominican composition travelling further than the credit for it did.

Legacy

Días changed what Dominican musicians believed was permissible. Before him the assumption was that folklore belonged in preservation and rock belonged to the Americans and the British; he treated the whole inventory — salve, palos, mangulina, merengue, bachata, Haitian rhythms — as raw material for contemporary music, and he had the fieldwork behind him to do it credibly rather than decoratively.

He was also a public intellectual whose arguments about Dominican identity, race and culture were as provocative as his records, and he never had the commercial career his influence would predict — radio programmers rarely knew where to put him. The measure of his standing is elsewhere: in the three hundred–odd songs other singers took to the charts, in the state naming a living musician national cultural patrimony, and in a funeral procession remembered as one of the longest the country has seen.