A style is born

A decade after he founded a new style of music, guitarist Ottmar Liebert tells GRAHAM REID why he appreciates a slower pace today.

Ottmar Liebert has just watched the sun set across the desert from his home. It's been a rare-enough pleasure - but a curious symmetry for this German-born guitarist who invented the "nouveau flamenco" style a decade ago.

After 15 years on the road through Asia and Europe with jazz-funk bands until the mid 80s, this son of a Chinese-German father and a Hungarian mother abandoned his electric instrument and returned to the classical training of youth, and more specifically to acoustic guitar, to forge a unique amalgam of flamenco with discreet touches of world music.

And the place he chose to settle to develop this Spanish sound? Santa Fe, New Mexico, near the Rio Grande, close to places with names of such Hispanic resonance as Madrid and Espanola.

The deserts of Santa Fe, he says, allowed him the emotional and physical space to relax and create the evolving style he has carried across 11 CDs in less than a decade, most notably on his debut album Nouveau Flamenco, which sold more than 20,000 copies in this country and achieved platinum sales in the United States and Australia.

But that place which afforded him the chance to develop - with his band Luna Negra - is also the one he started to see the least because of his success.

"For the five years between 1990 and 1995 we were either on road or in the studio in California and friends in Santa Fe never saw us. They thought we'd moved. So for me it felt time to spend more time at home, so a couple of years ago I built a studio and now we try to do one year away and the other spending more time here and recording.

"It was all getting a little much."

Liebert's solo career almost defines the word "meteoric."

He recorded a few instrumental tracks with his fledgling band, a local Santa Fe artist distributed them through art galleries, a radio station started to play some of the tunes, a small label picked up the album and remastered it, it was given wide distribution - and a star was born.

Liebert's appealingly eclectic style arrived as New Age guitar music had run its course. His style pushed the envelope and listeners were seduced by not just the technique and ambience, but also the memorable tunes.

Nouveau Flamenco may have topped the New Age charts, but it was more intelligent than most of the aimless acoustic noodling that category usually contains.

Over the years Liebert and band have pushed out ever more slightly: tracks on albums came with Indian tabla drums, vocals, string arrangements, r'n'b horns, and a Japanese koto appeared on his excellent The Hours Between Night and Day which also included electric guitar and remixes by Steve Hillage, Aki Nawaz and DJ Slip.

His latest album, Innamorare: Summer Flamenco, finds him back in the same upbeat mood of his debut after the more introspective double disc Opium recorded after the death of his mother.

And he's still incorporating other ideas, albeit discreetly.

"There's more of an r'n'b groove on this one. The first band I ever saw was Earth Wind and Fire, it was by accident. They were opening for Carlos Santana, but to this day they had the most serious groove I've ever heard."

And so for Innamorare he used his large-format touring band and, for the first time, a full drum kit alongside percussion and a small horn section.

Another voyage of discovery for him, just as listening back to Nouveau Flamenco has been as it is prepared for a special 10th-anniversary reissue next year which will come with five extra tracks recorded at the time but only recently discovered.

Who: Ottmar Liebert and Luna Negra

Where: Auckland Town Hall

When: Tuesday, April 13