José Manuel Rivera, known as Tulile and billed as El Rey Tulile, is a Dominican singer, saxophonist and composer. He is one of the principal names of merengue de calle, the fast, danceable and deliberately irreverent street form of merengue that took hold at the turn of the century.

The saxophone

He was born in Santo Domingo in 1976 and began studying music as a teenager, learning the saxophone at fourteen. The instrument, rather than his voice, is what first gave him a living.

The orchestras

He worked his way through the salaried circuit before fronting anything of his own. He played in the orchestra of the Santo Domingo fire brigade, then was hired by Dioni Fernández y El Equipo, then moved to the orchestra of Monchy Capricho, and then to Ramón Orlando & Orquesta Internacional. That is the standard route of a Dominican section player, and it accounts for the trained musicianship behind a genre usually described as raw.

On his own

At the end of the nineties he left the orchestras to record under his own name, choosing a deliberately provocative register: fast rhythm, comic lyrics and a steady undercurrent of double meaning. His second album, released in 2000, carried La Cuca, the record that made his name across the country.

Susana, Una Culebra, Tan Buena, Conmigo No and Presumida followed, and the formula held: the songs are built to be danced and repeated rather than contemplated.

The costumes

His stage presentation has drawn as much comment as the music. He has appeared in nappies, in a pharaoh’s costume and in a bridal gown, treating the concert as a spectacle in which the outfit is part of the joke.

Working from abroad

He moved to the United States in November 2011 and has continued to record and tour from there. His recent output includes merengue adaptations of hits from other genres, a practice that has kept his catalogue in circulation with younger audiences.