Ottmar Liebert

Nouveau Flamenco was Ottmar Liebert’s legendary, double-platinum selling debut that became the biggest selling guitar album of all time. Not simply redefining Flamenco music for the modern age but creating a whole new genre of music which sparked a revival in world music. Over the years, Liebert has become one of instrumental music’s most popular and compelling live performers around the world.

Liebert’s incredible global success on a musical level often seems like a simple outgrowth of his cultural background and powerful wanderlust in his formative years. Born in Cologne, Germany to a Chinese-German father and Hungarian mother, he began playing guitar at 11, and traveled extensively through Europe and Asia intent on fully absorbing each musical tradition he encountered. After pursuing his Rock and Roll dreams first in his native Germany and then in Boston, he abandoned the frustrations of the East coast and settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

By 1989, he had founded the first incarnation of his new band Luna Negra. Nouveau Flamenco began life as a self-produced local release called Marita: Shadows and Storms, copies of which local Indian artist Frank Howell distributed in his art galleries. When the record found its way to radio stations and began generating a buzz among programmers and an unprecedented response among listeners, Higher Octave Music picked it up and released a re-mastered version.

“I was honestly happy playing this music in hotels and restaurants in Santa Fe. In one year, going from doing that to opening for Miles Davis was a pretty intense jump,” he recalls. “Most shocking for me was to realize how many different people from so many diverse cultures embraced it. I still get letters from fans in Europe, South-America, Australia, and Asia...it’s been a really gratifying experience. I’ve had the opportunity to play in a wide variety of cultural settings with musicians from around the world, and that has been a great experience, too.”

Liebert has since become one of the most successful instrumental artists of the past decade, thrilling audiences throughout the world and releasing a catalog of classic recordings, including the remix collection Euphoria (1995), the live album Viva! (1995), the double CD Opium (1996) and the classical-oriented orchestral album Leaning into the Night (1997). He wrapped up his decade with Epic in 2001 with the release of Little Wing and founded his own label SSRI that same year. For two albums SSRI chose distribution and marketing through Higher Octave Music, releasing a lush album of lullabies called In the Arms of Love in June of 2002 and The Santa Fe Sessions in February of 2003. In the Arms of Love reflects the solo side of Liebert, which he is intent on exploring further, even as he continues to record acoustic based band projects with Luna Negra. The Santa Fe Sessions, the latest Ottmar Liebert + Luna Negra CD, is an extraordinary studio recording which reflects the new, expansive, live in concert character of ten classic tracks—including fresh guitar, percussion and horn parts. Liebert also blazes a trail into the future with two brand new compositions, the mystical, Brazilian flavored “Sao Paulo” and a Cuban spiced “Song for Pablo.”

Billboard Charts                  RIAA Certification

Web Sites
www.lunanegra.com
Wikipedia