The singer-songwriter from Extremadura officiated an emotional and delicate farewell recital at Luz de Gas, closing more than five decades of career, in which he cited the recent album ‘Y we returned to embrace each other’ and recovered the classic ‘A cántaros’
50 years ago Pablo Guerrero, following in the footsteps of Bob Dylan and his ‘A hard rain is a-gonna fall’, asked for it to rain “in buckets & rdquor; in a song associated with the appetite for living that took on a libertarian meaning in the context of the end of the dictatorship. And there he was, this Friday at Luz de Gas, as if those five decades had been a blink of an eye, telling us that his career as a background troubadour was coming to an end and leaving in the air, with ellipses, the desire for a restorative shower.
The Extremaduran singer-songwriter, based in Madrid, announced two years ago to this newspaper his desire to withdraw, which covid-19 through, is now consumed with this farewell album, ‘Y we returned to embrace each other’, released last fall (around its 75th anniversary), and with a tour that brought him to the festival, Barnasants, which has welcomed him repeatedly in recent decades. Twilight night, but wake up, as always was the race of this creator willing to marry poetic art with musical research: Guerrero is the singer-songwriter capable of sensitively approaching jazz, flamenco, African rhythms and the avant-garde, and of establishing links with artists from other generations, such as Esclarecidos or Javier Álvarez.
In their own way
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His word resonated in Luz de Gas with all the echo of wisdom and precise melodic calligraphy, backed by the quartet that has accompanied him for yearswith Luis Mendo (Suburban) and his guitars, and delicate trumpet tracks, keyboards and double bass. Always oblivious to the busiest, looking for his own expressions and letting the texts breathe, Guerrero gave us another life lesson in his elegant way of blending into silence. With signs of creative vitality in that central block based on his latest songs, such as the luminous ‘Islas en Bajamar’ (text by Santos Domínguez), the minimalist ‘Mitades’ and that ‘Lleno Empty’ with frontier sounds.
Pablo Guerrero has never been an artist prone to the ritual recreation of his legacy, and even on this last occasion he could not bring himself to look back more than was fair. Preferring that the songs of his modern era speak for him, he went to ‘Noche interior’ and ‘Plata’, and sweetly sang to us that “dreams are possible” because “they descend like rain” and “they come if you call them” (‘Dreams’). And he went back to pour”, chorus boosted by the audience’s choir, touched by melancholy but with its load of anthem of the future.