Fogaraté!

Guerra, Juan Luis y 440

album cover

Carefully Planned Collisions

All recording artists struggle with stereotyping, but those who make tropical Latin music perhaps suffer the most: The minute a Latin band has a hit built on a specific regional rhythm, like say Colombian cumbia, it is expected to churn out similar cumbias, if not exact facsimiles, forevermore. The charismatic Juan Luis Guerra has openly defied this marketing constriction. He's from the Dominican Republic, and though his early hits were associated with the country's brisk dance style known as merengue, he's insisted on exploring lots of distantly related musics, including funk and salsa and, on several sumptuously arranged tracks on this set, African soukous.

Guerra, who studied at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, isn't interested in putting the whole world-in-a-blender approach: He brings a respect for tradition, and a craftsman's sense of detail, to his carefully managed collisions. The tracks enlivened by soukous catch the subtleties of both styles without blurring their distinctive features; Guerra's precision makes this new pulse seem utterly organic, like it should have been there all along. When, on "La cosquillita," Guerra's mighty band 440 welcomes the legendary accordionist of traditional merengue, Francisco Ulloa (see page 794), they play things by the book, perfectly placing every last tick of the mercilessly fast rhythm so old-time sticklers will appreciate it.

The album's highlight is the straightforward "Oficio de enamorado," a suave salsa adventure that moves at two speeds simultaneously: As the band punches out a razor-sharp, exacting rhythm, Guerra trades the Dominican punctuality for a looser, more Cuban approach to time, singing about the thrills and torments of love like he's got all day.

Genre: World, Dominican Republic
Released: 1994, RCA International
Key Tracks: "Oficio de enamorado," "El farolito."
Catalog Choice: Bachata rosa.
Next Stop: Pedro Luis Ferrer: Rustico
After That: Milly Quezada: Tesoros de mi tierra.
Book Pages: 328–329

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Comments:

#1 from Guillermo Pérez, Dominican Republic - 05/25/2009 8:26

This is wrong!

The cover is from another album, Bachata Rosa, but more than that the info is also mixed up… Bachata Rosa is his biggest most important recording and it got somehow Bundled up with this other one in the review.

#2 from Tom Moon - 05/25/2009 9:26

Thanks for your note!

You are correct about the cover—that looks like some strange European version of the Bachata Rosa cover. Thanks for catching…we’ll work on that.

And though Bachata Rosa was his biggest record (breakthrough, really), it’s possible to learn just as much, if not more, from the subsequent titles. Fogarate extends the rhythmic blending of Bachata more fully, and for me goes in more interesting directions.

thanks very much for your note!

tm

#3 from Workman Publishing - 05/28/2009 9:34

Thank you for letting us know! I’ve fixed the album cover and links.

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