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Lisa Wilton Like a painter uses brush strokes to create a scene and a chef uses spices to create flavour, Ottmar Liebert uses guitar strings to create a mood. It's a natural comparison for the 40-year-old Nouveau Flamenco guitarist, who has always believed art, music and food go hand-in-hand. "I think music and art are very close to one another," says Liebert, who performs with Luna Negra XL on Tuesday at the Jubilee Auditorium. "I had a very interesting experience in Sydney (Australia) about a month ago. A Japanese chef, who is a master at not only all the Asian cuisines, but also all the European cuisines, made a meal for me. "He would follow sushi with an almost Italian pasta dish, followed by something that had a certain French touch to it. "I thought that was very inspiring. "It was a perfect combination, and seamless mixture of spice and food from around the world. "I sort of hope that's what my music does too." Having attended a special fine-arts high school -- where three of the five school days were dedicated solely to drawing, painting and sculpting -- in his native Cologne, Germany, Liebert tends to take an almost visual approach to songwriting. "I think a lot of the methods I use and the way I think about music comes from a more painterly or fine arts approach," he says. "I always think of the tape and the recorder as being a canvas that moves by at 30 inches per second and can be erased if I don't like it." While art has had a huge influence on his work, Liebert also credits extensive travelling and an openness to different cultural experiences as having made a major contribution to his music. "I enjoy travelling," he says. "There's three keys to any culture. It's music, art and food. You can tell a lot about a culture from that. If you like these three items, then you'll probably like the culture. "The rest is just borders that the politician put up." Liebert's latest CD is this year's Innamorare -- Summer Flamenco, a collection of breezy, enchanting instrumentals inspired by a seven-week stay in Tuscany during the spring of 1997. "When I came back from Italy, I said I wanted to make an album with the working title of Summer Flamenco, something that had that feeling of driving to the Mediterranean and stopping for a cappuccino somewhere and just hanging out," says Liebert, who moved to the U.S. 20 years ago and now calls Santa Fe, N.M. home. "I'd been touring so much since 1990 that this was the first time that I could relax for seven weeks. I read so many books, which was also inspirational." While Liebert lounged around in Tuscany, he was delightfully surprised when his song, 2 the Night, which was being used in an Italian film called The Cyclone, became the country's No. 1 song after some DJs remixed it as a club song. "I thought it was so great to have an instrumental song as the No. 1 song," says Liebert, who re-recorded the song for Innamorare. "Some DJs have done a remix of Spanish Steps, which is odd because it's the most traditionally flamenco song on the album. "I find that sort of thing interesting. I like to hear how other people perceive a melody and what they do with it." |