Juan Luis Guerra

Dominican Sounds Meet Personal Style
By JOHN PARELES
Published: July 21, 2008

There’s no place like home for Juan Luis Guerra, the Dominican Republic’s leading pop songwriter, who won five Latin Grammy Awards last year with his album “La Llave de Mi Corazón” (“The Key to My Heart,” from EMI Latin). Mr. Guerra’s songs, which have become hits across the Spanish-speaking world, are firmly grounded in the Dominican Republic’s upbeat merengue and lilting bachata, along with the island’s various regional styles. But that doesn’t mean Mr. Guerra is in any way provincial.
Robert Caplin for The New York Times
The Dominican star Juan Luis Guerra performing at Madison Square Garden on Friday night.
The song that started his concert on Friday night at Madison Square Garden — part of his first major United States tour since the 1990s — was “La Travesía” (“The Crossing”). As dancers rolled carry-on bags around the stage, the song name-dropped a traveler’s stopovers from Manhattan to Namibia to Kuala Lumpur; he was searching the world, unsuccessfully, for someone like his lover. Another song, “Como Yo” (“Like Me”), preferred her laughter to Beethoven symphonies or van Gogh paintings.
That kind of sweetly monogamous sentiment runs through Mr. Guerra’s songs. His newer lyrics extol lovers as the moon and stars, though their imagery isn’t quite as free-associative as older songs that also compare love to food and medical procedures.
Amid the love songs Mr. Guerra also sang in his reedy, amiable voice about the island’s farmers in “Ojalá que Llueva Café” (“May It Rain Coffee,” a prayer for abundance) and about Christian faith in songs from his devout but thoroughly danceable 2004 album, “Para Ti” (“For You,” from Venemusic). Although he has been a hit maker since the early 1990s, he is not old-fashioned. The song “La Llave de Mi Corazón” is about an American caller to a romantic-advice radio show, who wonders how to court a Dominican woman he met online.
Mr. Guerra led a 20-member lineup of his band, called 440 (which is the frequency of the note A above middle C that many orchestras tune to). Behind them were flashy video screens, yet at the center of the stage were merengue’s traditional percussion instruments, the two-headed drum called a tambora, and the guiro, or scraper.
The band included six horns and six percussionists, and it galloped into the merengues, with Mr. Guerra’s snappy brass-section arrangements and glided through the bachatas. His hits, like “Bachata Rosa” (“Rose Bachata”) and “Burbujas de Amor” (“Bubbles of Love”) have helped transform bachata from a rural Dominican phenomenon to a national pop form.
Mr. Guerra is no traditionalist. He filters Dominican styles through his own pop sensibility, inserting more chords than standard merengues use and letting keyboards share the guitar syncopations of typical bachatas. His music has open borders; he draws on blues, funk, jazz, Caribbean salsa and the guitar lines that Congolese musicians came up with when they reclaimed the Afro-Cuban rumba. But he also digs into Dominican roots.
“El Farolito” (“The Little Light”) uses an older, even more up-tempo kind of merengue — perico ripiao — with 440’s keyboardist and musical director, Janina Rosado, replicating traditional accordion chords on her electric keyboard. The audience members — some perhaps homesick, others swept up in an irresistible beat — were dancing in the aisles.