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CONCERTED EFFORT
Juan Luis Guerra at Agganis Arena
BY MICHAEL FREEDBERG
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Last Sunday evening, Juan Luis Guerra, the veteran king of Dominican merengue, brought his thick-textured, deeply rhythmic, sweetly sung music to Boston University’s Agganis Arena. Every seat was taken, as well as most of the standing room (a feat not even Boston’s venerable Pixies could accomplish). The audience stood and cheered as Guerra made his entrance (duplicated on video, from a helicopter, with swarms of wasps), dressed all in black and wearing a black beret. Behind him stood two pairs of percussionists and a drummer, and alongside, two back-up singers and a keyboardist; Guerra sang and played guitar (acoustic mostly). It was a night for optimism, and then some. From the very first song and all the way through to the encore — the band’s 16th and 17th numbers — the music either pulsed, fast and faster, or crooned on lushly in melodic power ballads common to the Europop that Guerra, like Enrique Iglesias and many other modern-day Latino pop stars, has embraced and mastered. Indeed, for Guerra, the ballads were an occasion for him to display his Christianity — to which, so his local publicist told me, he has recently converted. At the climax of one such song — plaintively sung and played, flush with melodic ache — there appeared on the video screen behind Guerra the words of "Juan 3:16" (the passage in which John begins, "For God so loved the world that he sent his only Son"). The audience loved Guerra’s sermon, but they seemed to love his rhythms even more. At one point in particular, as his band switched from a fast merengue traipse to a deep-house-music groove, practically everyone in the arena stood up, raised their hands, and cheered. Thereafter, except for the ballad interludes, the concert became nonstop dancing, as people danced in the aisles with whomever happened to be standing next to them; later, as the music segued from house music to fast merengue to salsa (one song only) and back to thick-textured merengue again, the dancers changed partners, and changed again. A 75-year-old man, previously sitting on the sidelines, danced with one of the event staff; two prettily dressed women with flowing, curly hair danced together for a while, until men cut in, sleek in their green, Dominican baseball caps and slim shirts and pants. The dancing was only intensified by a long, exhausting rhythm break made by each of the band’s percussionists in turn, textures and tones alternating rhapsodically. The audience was as happy as Guerra’s music was melodic and as well-dressed as his rhythms were rich. People of all ages attended, beautifully groomed and beautifully garbed. Easily they could all have shared the stage and spotlight with Guerra, who ended his concert sporting a gray suede suit jacket and a blue beret. Surely they were making a statement. No place here for the violent vulgarities, scruffy sexuality, and teenage-ego dead ends that dominate American hip-hop, and all the better for it.
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