The travels of Ottmar

nouveau flamenco
Ottmar Liebert.

Master guitarist and Zen monk Ottmar Liebert comes to Saint Rocke

nouveau flamenco

Ottmar Liebert.

Forty years ago an unusual boy, born with a faraway look in his eyes, wandered the streets of Cologne, Germany.

Ottmar Liebert, as he would later describe himself, was a mutt. The son of a German-Chinese father and a Hungarian mother, Liebert possessed a restlessness that first found purchase when he put his hands on the fretboard of a guitar at the age of 11. He took more than a casual interest in the instrument and studied classically. By the time he hit his teenage years, he’d made a very conscious decision: he wanted to rock n’ roll.

“Doesn’t everyone? There comes a time as a teenager when a nylon string guitar is just not loud enough,” Liebert recalled in an interview this week.

At 16, he set his mind to it. Liebert took a summer job working in a factory, from 7 a.m. until 4 p.m. every day. He took his earnings, bought an electric guitar, and formed a rock n’ roll band.

The music was strong in him, but it was just something he did. After high school, he intended to go to school and study design. But first he needed to attend to his wanderlust, and took off on a long sojourn – one that he didn’t realize until much later would never truly end.

Liebert traveled to Moscow, where he then took the Trans-Siberian Railway – the longest train line in the world, spanning 5,772 miles – all the way to the Sea of Japan. He continued to Japan, then Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, India, and Nepal. He carried his old acoustic guitar with him, and the instrument gave him access to the cultures he was visiting in a way that otherwise would not have been possible.

“I played with a whole bunch of different people along the way and really enjoyed sometimes being able to make music with people without actually communicating with them – I didn’t speak their language, and they didn’t speak mine,” Liebert said.

It was a transformative experience. Liebert returned to Cologne and changed courses, abandoning his plan of becoming a designer to instead form a funk rock band. He felt inevitably drawn, however, to the land where his heroes – Santana, Miles Davis, John McLaughlin, and Jimi Hendrix – had made their mark. In 1979, he traveled to America. He landed first in Boston, where he worked by day as a bike messenger and by night as a rock musician. His band RED had some success – opening up for the likes of Ministry – but by and large Liebert’s dream wasn’t taking off. He couldn’t get radio play and the local club scene was grueling.

Then a friend asked him to travel with him to New Mexico. The friend, who was moving back to his native Santa Fe, thought his hometown might suit Liebert.

“Who knows? Maybe this is where it will all start for you,” the friend said.

Liebert agreed to visit, but in the back of his mind he remembers thinking, “Yeah, sure, going to a backwater little town – things are supposed to happen for me?” He figured he’d stay a few weeks.

He fell in love with the place almost immediately. Santa Fe is known as “The City Different,” a town of 67,000 people residing at 7,200 feet above sea level. Its culture is a swirl of Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo – the latter the term locals use for anybody of any Caucasian background, including Liebert, who had an epiphany of sorts when he walked into a restaurant one day and saw a strange trio of musicians making a marvelously different kind of music.

“There was a flamenco guitarist performing with a violinist and a banjo player, and I thought, ‘This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.’ I am not a big fan of banjo, I have to say, but I was just fascinated. These three guys – to me, it sort of epitomized Santa Fe, you know, you’ve got three really different instruments making music together. I’m hooked.”

His friend had a beat-up old out-of-tune nylon string guitar. Liebert resurrected the instrument and answered an ad in a local paper placed by a restaurant looking for a guitar player.

“I just went down there and made up some music, played some stuff, and was paid something ridiculous – like twenty bucks and a meal,” he said. “It seemed so direct: food and money. Perfect.”

And there he might have resided quite happily forever more. Liebert played restaurants in Santa Fe for three years before he and the band he’d formed – Luna Negra – produced a homemade CD that originally was just distributed by the Native American artist Frank Howell at his galleries. They called the music “nouveau flamenco” and it featured rumbas and other flamenco-inspired music infused with rock n’ roll insistency, simple melodies and grit. Locally, the record was a hit, and that’s all Liebert had intended.

Then he came home one day to his cramped little adobe apartment to find a strange message waiting on his answering machine. The man identified himself as from the big radio station, The WAVE, in Los Angeles.

“We’ve added six or seven of your songs to our playlist,” the man said. “We have never done that from any album, and we have no idea who the hell you are.”

Soon, the record companies came courting. But Liebert found himself in an unusual position: he didn’t really give a damn. He didn’t need them.

“I remember what they said,” he recalled. “‘First of all, we need you to move to LA. Second of all, you need to change your name.’ And I said, ‘Go to hell.’ I enjoyed where I was and what I was doing. Of course, I’d like an album out – of course, who wouldn’t – but I am not going to change my name and I’m not going to move to LA. It’s a bit like chasing a woman, and then you turn away, and suddenly she starts chasing after you.”

The rest is musical history. Liebert signed a deal with Higher Octave Music and began an almost unparalleled ascent. His debut album, Nouveau Flamenco, went double platinum and became one of the biggest selling instrumental guitar records of all time. Within a year of his regular restaurant gigs in Santa Fe, he was warming up for his hero Miles Davis. A few years later, he played alongside Santana. He has since released more than 25 albums and is widely considered one of the greatest guitarists on the planet.

His music is still called “nouveau flamenco” but is a testament to the limited applicability of genres. A river of song from sources all around the world flows through Liebert’s music, which in some ways remains rooted in Santa Fe and in a deeper sense carries with it the wanderlust that began so long ago in Germany.

“I am a mixed-culture person and then I found myself in Santa Fe which is sort of mixed-culture place, and I think my whole life I can look back at how I mixed stuff,” he said. “I don’t keep things apart very well. And it’s not just between styles. I might be cooking something and smelling something and go, ‘Oh, that inspires a line of poetry.’ And that line of poetry inspires a sound that I hear and then I’m off to run to my guitar and play something…It’s a very boundless thing.”

It somehow comes as little surprise to anyone who has heard his music that Liebert has become an ordained Zen Buddhist monk. It isn’t that his music is particularly restive – although sometimes that is surely the case – but that there is an unforced quality, a playfulness that is at once both elaborate and somehow simple.

Liebert said that he mediated long before he became a Buddhist and that the commonality was within his sense of musical practice – both involved long hours of sitting in attentiveness, in literal practice.

“I think it is one of the most essential things. When you look at our culture in many ways it’s gone from depth to width,” Liebert said. “The Internet is not about depth; it’s about reaching many people with a little thing. Or even when you go to the radio, it used to be half an hour or an hour, now it’s just give me a snippet, just give me one cool sentence I can push across the airwaves. And I think with a lot of stuff we are losing depth and creating width. And depth, whether in a relationship or a practice or a drawing or poetry, lies in becoming intimate and familiar with the subject you are working with, right? So that means time…It’s not even work. It’s something you want to do, and you have this sense of practicing.”

“I remember the first time I went to a weeklong practice at the Zen center, where you sit for six or seven hours every day, after the first day some friends were saying, ‘So how is it?’ Well it’s no different from being a musician. It’s a different field, it’s your mind, but musicians practice. There is no difference. And I am grateful: it’s a path to depth that can then illuminate a lot of other things.”

Ottmar Liebert and Luna Negra play Saint Rocke Sunday night; tickets $30. Free wine tastings for presale ticket holders will be served with the price of admission from 6 to 7 p.m. Show starts at 8 p.m. 

 

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