His music, like his hometown, draws from several cultures

By Jerry Fink

Monday, July 13, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Twenty-three years ago guitarist Ottmar Liebert stopped in Santa Fe, N.M., to rest for a couple of weeks after a grueling concert tour.

He never left.

“The emptiness of the landscape around Santa Fe and the fact that it is also a multicultural city attracted me,” he says. “People here generally refer to it as tri-cultural, which is Hispanic, Native American and, in the local language, a grab bag called Anglo. You can be Chinese or African — if you are not Hispanic or Native American, you’re Anglo.

“But there seems to be a willingness to combine cultures here that I haven’t seen in many places ... To a great extent that’s what my music is about. My personal vantage point of melding different influences and cultures and things. So that’s why I’m still here.”

The 50-year-old native of Cologne, Germany, is a one-man melting pot. His father was Chinese and German; his mother, Hungarian.

The virtuoso guitarist blends flamenco, South American, rock, jazz and pop influences. His most recent album, “Scent of Light,” earned Liebert his fifth Grammy nomination. A compilation, “Spanish Sun,” was released this week in Target stores.

Liebert and his band, Luna Negra, will perform Friday at Boulder Station.

What were your musical influences?

My dad was a music lover. He listened to swing music. I grew up listening to Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington, things like that. But there was no music education at my house, really. Radio was quite different then than it is now. The mix of music that would come from my mother’s radio in the kitchen was just unbelievable. Now it’s just sort of the same songs every 40 minutes. But in those days the variety was staggering.

How did you become interested in guitar?

I just got lucky. I had seen guitar players. I grew up pretty much without a TV or a telephone. What I saw left a large impression on me. And there was a program in Cologne where for $20 a semester you could get a once-a-week group lesson from a teacher who would come from the music conservatory. I was further lucky enough that my teacher saw something in me. He would have a half-hour group class and then dismiss them and stay for half an hour with me. So for $20 a semester I learned quite a bit.

At what point did you decide to make music a career?

I started lessons when I was 12. I started traveling on my own quite a bit when I was 16 and 17. I was going to an art school. I wanted to become either a photographer or a designer. I graduated when I was 18. I took a trip, centered around Asia, that took 10 to 12 months. I took my guitar. I enjoyed so much making music with people, especially since a lot of those people I could not communicate well with in any language. But for some reason we always found a way to express something musically. When I came home I decided I wanted to be a musician, and since a lot of the musicians I admired were from the United States, that’s where I went. I had just turned 20 when I arrived in New York.

Did you start out playing flamenco?

My early influences were on the rock side. The first concert I ever attended, in Cologne in ’75, I went to see the headliner, Carlos Santana, and ended up being blown away by the opening act, which was a band we had never heard anything of — Earth, Wind and Fire.

How did Zen Buddhism affect your music?

I’ve actually been meditating for 35 years. Musicians do this all the time. We sit there and we practice and we practice and we practice and we play a piece over and over and over and that’s how you get better, by repetitions. Meditating and sitting is really the same thing, only more geared to your mind.