Juan Luis Guerra reaches a perfect pitch.

• Author: Holston, Mark

It is a rule of thumb as old as the music business itself: When musicians themselves begin to talk about the arrival of a new talent, listen carefully. The people who spend their waking hours planning how to capture the public's attention through music know something genuinely special when they hear it.

"Have you heard Juan Luis Guerra and Cuatro Cuarenta?" From New York to the Caribbean, this question inevitably comes up when the subject is tropical music. For the past five years, the Latin music scene has been abuzz with talk of a fast rising star, a lanky Santo Domingo native whose new twist on merengue rhythms, poetic lyrics, and sophisticated melodies have propelled him and his group past long-established stars of the movement to the very forefront of mass popularity.

Even the mainstream media have taken notice. Newsweek magazine, in a recent feature that documented the current movers and shakers of the Latin music world, cited Guerra's "unique Caribbean pulse" and noted the composer has "searched the bruised regional soul and merged his merengue with salsa, Afro-Antillean folk and the romantic ballad known as bachata."

So far, fans on four continents have pushed sales of Guerra's new recording, Bachata Rosa, to over 3.5 million copies - an unheard of figure for a recording by a Dominican artist. Audiences in the thousands have mobbed his group's concerts in cities through-out Latin America and Europe, and Guerra's just-concluded thirteen-city tour of the United States may rank as the most successful North American tour by a Hispanic musician ever.

The object of all this attention is a quiet, intense young man whose unpretentious attitude and mold-breaking attributes make him every bit as interesting as the music he creates. On the surface, the 34-year-old Guerra seems quite the opposite of the smooth and sexy image we have come to expect from the music hit factory. Perhaps that is one of the keys to the Dominican's amazing success - a supreme self confidence in his distinctive image and personal style, and the ability to resist any attempt to conform to an arbitrary industry norm.

At six feet, four inches tall, the bearded Guerra, in his trademark baggy black clothing, stands almost motionless onstage, an imposing yet slightly bemusing figure. His consciously-designed stage manner is a real key to understanding Guerra's unique synthesis of styles. Although he wraps his music in the rhythmic and orchestral trappings of merengue and...