Ottmar Liebert is a German-born musician renowned for his flamenco music with a global backstory. His 1990 debut album Nouveau Flamenco is recognized as one of the top-selling instrumental acoustic guitar albums of all time.
Liebert’s path to flamenco music actually began in Asia. He compared his journey to that of pioneering blues rock guitarist Eric Clapton, born in England, an ocean away from the blues homeland.
“It's just something that you hear and it moves you, and it came after I spent a year in Asia,” Liebert told KNKX, during a conversation following his KNKX Studio Session in February.
He described traveling and while he didn’t often speak the language, he often played music with other locals and travelers. While Liebert originally wanted to be a designer and photographer, even attending an arts-focused high school, his travels changed that.
“I think the experience of just communicating through music was such that that's what I wanted to do,” he recalled.
Access to affordable music education also tipped the scales. Liebert described a “wonderful” program that allowed him to study classical guitar in high school. The cost was $20 per semester per year — not per class. Liebert said his parents couldn’t afford anything else and he learned so much.
“If you want to have musicians and culture in your society, you need to make it available,” he said.
The journey starts
Liebert moved to Boston in 1979 at age 20. There, he started playing in bands and didn’t even have an acoustic guitar, now his signature. At the time, he mostly played electric guitar.
“It was not until I moved to Santa Fe when I encountered a flamenco guitar player in person, and I studied with him.”
From there, much of Leibert’s music knowledge was acquired less formally, through surprise connections made while on the road. For instance, during a monthlong stay at Sikh Temple in Hong Kong, where he could eat and sleep for a small donation, he jammed with two Sikh priests and musicians multiple times a week.
In New Delhi, while staying in the cheapest hotel room — a tent on the roof — he met an Australian woman that pierced his ear with a needle and potato, and a Colombian man who played guitar well. Leibert and the Colombian guitarist played often together.
Leibert brings all of his eclectic musical exchanges and experiences to flamenco, a music that draws influence from Romani and Arabic culture, as well as from Africa and the Caribbean.
“A lot of people think it's this Spanish thing, and it really isn't. Without all these immigrants, whether they were the Arabs or the gypsies or everybody else, that music just would not exist. And you know, it's glorious music that only came from mixing it up and making that happen,” he said.
As he champions the diverse peoples and sounds inherent in the music, he also remembers the ethos that underpins flamenco, a style which was born out of the hardships the Romani people faced under Spanish rule. They kept the music alive in secret for many hundreds of years, and it wasn’t until the ‘60s or ‘70s that the music was finally seen as a more legitimate artform and allowed into concert halls.
Musical momentum
Leibert’s approach to flamenco guitar has taken him far. In fact, he once had the opportunity to open for Miles Davis in Seattle. He describes the experience as “the most starstruck he’s ever been.”
“All of us were huge Miles Davis fans, and we just held back on, like getting an autograph. Yeah, and it happened to be one of those nights when he was just so social. And afterwards, we're leaving and we see him in the back alley signing stuff for like 30 or 40 fans that are all standing there. We're like, ‘Damn, we missed it,’” he said.
Since 2019, Leibert has released a half dozen records, but he has boycotted streaming platforms like Spotify. His more recent records are on Bandcamp, and he’s soon to release a new record — Bamboo, due out in June.
“Bamboo sounds amazing when the wind goes through it, but also I think it's such a great metaphor for our time,” he said. “You can be progressive, you can be conservative, but what we really need is the same. We need food, shelter and love.”
Interview by Paige Hansen. Written by Alexa Peters.
