Marc Anthony was a Caribbean hurricane unleashed on the cold Buenos Aires night

With two shows at the Movistar Arena in Buenos Aires (the second will be tonight) Marc Anthony presented a battery of hits along with some songs from his new album, the thirteenth of his career, entitled here I am. A blend of salsa sounds, boleros, ballads and pop music launched on March 4 this year.

And last night, in the first recital, the Puerto Rican left his well-established reals, validating the nickname his fans from Miami to Argentina have imposed on him: The golden bow.

To dance from the first minute

Marc Anthony loaded the sauce on his shoulder, grabbed the Caribbean by the hair and dragged it to the southern tip of the continent. Dressed in a black leather jacket, denim pants, a black shirt and sunglasses, Anthony, whose real name is Marco Antonio Muñiz Rivera, wasted no time and went straight to what he came for: making the his audience from the first minute.

mounted on the overwhelming precision of a band of virtuosos, Anthony started his show at the top with the opening theme and title for the new album. No chatter here. There is no time to lose. Because all these people will get the rhythm and song equivalent of the small fortune they paid to accompany their idol.

A sober and measured showman, a frontman with more than thirty years of experience who perfectly knows the consequence of his every move on stage. Sympathy is the name of the game.

At 9:14 pm the band started playing and exactly four minutes later, when the audience was warm, they appeared. The show lasts an hour and a half (including encore), which ended as it had begun, to the rhythm of an unstoppable locomotive. Thirteen songs rocked the Puerto Rican during that time, and he just spoke to say, “Hello Argentina, finally, finally, finally”. Nothing else is needed.

The audience sang each of the themes. And the Arena was a pressure cooker that could burst at any moment.

a Latin audience

That public so colorful, so varied and Latin, made up of a large number of Venezuelans (Marc Anthony began to visit Venezuela in the late 90s, they know him well there) as well as Colombians, Peruvians, Brazilians and of course Argentines. that the artist reaches out to catch their breath, to make them sing, to harangue and seduce them thanks to the close-ups of the cameras that replicate his image on the three LED screens, in a panoramic dimension.

And the atmosphere thickens as the recital goes on. In the bolero-guajira Until yesterday Argentine guitarist Mario Guini got his Fender Stratocaster guitar talking with a solo that rocked the stage. The seventh theme was a hodgepodge of unbeatable ballads: Hold me tight, Pillow (a tribute to his friend José José) and a personal version of the And how are you? by José Luis Perales.

The show gave no respite. Marc leaves everything on stage, but the band does not go into the saga. With four percussionists working like the gears of a clock, the apotheotic moments follow one another. The duo of congas (Eric Vélez) and timbales (Jessie Caraballo) offered such a close and synchronized interaction that they were sometimes reminiscent of Santana’s drummers (Chepito Areas-Armando Peraza or Raúl Rekow-Carl Perazzo, depending on the time).

The same singer climbed the steps of a staircase and sat down at the drums to add drums to the diabolical percussion of Countercurrenta track included on their third album of the same name, released in 1997.

then they came what is the price of heaven Y Bad, another of the cuts of the new material. Marc Anthony pushes from the stage, turns his back on the audience to direct his orchestra, dances and moves his pelvis like a rumble Elvis, fades the tones of his voice and even gets excited by singing. Pale flower

Undeniable heir to the lineage of salsa singers (not surprisingly also Puerto Ricans) such as Cheo Feliciano, Ismael Miranda, Ismael Rivera or Pete “El Conde” Rodríguez, Marc instead represents a younger generationrooted, it is true, in the tradition of New York salsa but at the same time with one foot planted both in the intersection of a Caribbean pop and in certain modern bolero arias.

And to reinforce this mixture of styles that preserves the figurehead intact, the arrangements of the wind section (two trumpets and three trombones) refer both to those of Johnny Pacheco with the Fania All Stars and to those of Rubén Blades’ ex-partner , trombonist Willy Colón and the best recordings of the Miami Sound Machine by Emilio Estefan Jr.

Namely: these people know what they are doing and they show it on the Movistar Arena stage song by song.

own merit

This is Marc Anthony’s seventh visit to Argentina: he arrived in 2011, twice in 2012, in 2013, 2016, 2018 and 2022. And on each of those trips he left a trail of new followers and dozens of fan clubs (including if only three are officers here). The boy earns it by hand.

And not only; To his detractors, who at one point had spread the word that he owed everything to the popularity he gained after his marriage to Jennifer López, with whom he was married between 2004 and 2011, he left a very clear message: It is pure merit.

That species took shape in 2006, when Marc portrayed the life of the famous and unfortunate salsa singer Héctor Lavoe (who died of AIDS in 1993) in a film with his wife of the time, who was also one of the producers of that film.

However, Anthony’s connection with cinema dates back to 1993, when he collaborated on one of his songs (looks like a lie) in Brian de Palma’s film Street of Carlitoand then he participated as an actor in ten other films, by various well-known directors.

In between, Anthony sang with great luminaries, from José Feliciano, Olga Tañón and Marco Antonio Solís to Chayanne, Carlos Vives, Thalía and even Cypress Hill themselves.

Today, in a relationship with the Paraguayan model and entrepreneur Nadia Ferreira, thirty years younger than him, after three marriages and five children, and reached 54 (he does them on September 16), Marc Anthony seems to have no roof.

And it is also the missing link that binds the salsa (the genre created by the Puerto Ricans of New York in the sixties from the Caribbean son montuno), the new bolero, the romantic song and pop with enviable naturalness. The new album is a sales success and their shows are completely sold out.

“Good night, God bless you”, he says goodbye, but there are no encores and they are two of those songs that turn on the lights, literally from the torches of the public’s cell phones. he sings your love is good for methat song that he is said to have dedicated to his ex, JLo (now married to actor Ben Afleck) and Live my life.

Marc Anthony is a Caribbean hurricane unleashed in the cold Buenos Aires night. Nothing can stop it, it’s pure fire. But next time some environmental advocacy organization should ban this man. Certainly with so much heat the glaciers are in serious danger of melting.

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