The tiered stage, the quartet of dancers and the all-purpose six-piece band could have turned Nelly Furtado’s Wednesday night concert at Hard Rock Live into the Grammys. This talented pop star of Canadian and Portuguese descent has always played up her varied background and multicultural tastes — so much so that prolonged exposure to Furtado can feel like a speech on the virtues of open-mindedness.
But on Wednesday she sang so energetically across a range of styles that the vaguely-Vegas aspects of her live production made sense. Furtado might be mistaking a variety-show impulse for something higher-minded — an eclecticism that thinks it has something to teach us. But with a clutch of likeable songs, and with Furtado in the role of versatile host, the origins of her approach to entertainment hardly mattered.
The capacity crowd of 5,500 got a rousing set of pop, rock, soul and club tracks along with ballads in English and Spanish, an acoustic cover of Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy and, to finish off, a jamming 20-minute encore that could have been renamed the Nelly Furtado Dance Party.
She made an entrance that seemed designed to underwhelm, hanging back at the top of the stage staircase for the evening’s opener, a minor-keyed plaint called Say It Right. She was more visible and audible toasting like a dancehaller on passages of Turn Off the Light, from her 2000 debut, Whoa, Nelly!. The live arrangement cranked up the block-party frequencies, but even the studio original has more street sensibility than the recent “Furtado discovers hip-hop” storyline would acknowledge.
Most of the set came from Loose, the hit 2006 album Furtado recorded with hip-hop producer Timbaland. Loose was a departure, to be sure, from its predecessor: 2003’s Folklore sounded like Furtado playing cultural sensitivity trainer. That album got scant attention on Wednesday, although Furtado sang two Folklore tracks — Powerless (Say What You Want) and the sports-stadium blowout Forca — with enough verve to make both sound like grand finales.
Loose and Whoa, Nelly! provided most of the fireworks, and complemented each other well enough to make Folklore seem like the stepchild. Showtime (from Loose) was a nicely wrought pop-soul ballad with a dramatic streak worthy of Mary J. Blige. I’m Like a Bird, a power ballad from Whoa, Nelly!, was remixed for 2007 and resembled nothing so much as Blackstreet’s vamping No Diggity. Furtado should have arranged it like this back in 2000.
When Loose came out last year, Promiscuous and Maneater were both put forward as examples of Furtado becoming more frank and liberated in her subject matter. But on Wednesday, neither was freighted with so much seriousness of purpose. They were just the songs that got everyone out of their seats to dance.
