Drawn From the Landscape : Santa Fe Serves as an ‘Empty Canvas’ for Guitarist’s Work

When Ottmar Liebert plays his guitar, one gets a definite sense of the New Mexican landscape that inspires his music. Even when he is playing a concert in Alberta, Canada--as he does on the hourlong program “Wide-Eyed + Dreaming” being shown tonight on KOCE-TV Channel 50--he imparts the mood and atmosphere of his Santa Fe home.

The program--which features Liebert and his band, Luna Negra, performing at the Calgary Centre for the Performing Arts--includes brief segments filmed around Santa Fe with Liebert talking about his music. These interludes give only glimpses into the thinking that informs his pastoral yet rhythmic sound, but on the phone from a tour stop in Dallas this week, Liebert expanded on some of the notions he addresses during the show.

On TV, Liebert says he was “blown away” by the emptiness of the landscape in Santa Fe and by the way the silence serves as an “empty canvas” for him. “Coming to Santa Fe gives you another perspective,” he elaborated on the phone. “After all the noise and the volume you have out on the road, it’s wonderful to come back to such a quiet place.”

Before he moved to Santa Fe in 1986, Liebert lived in Boston where he played punk and rock guitar in local bars. “I hadn’t played nylon strings in 10 years,” he recalls. “I was in need of a change.”

Friends in Santa Fe encouraged him to join them and Liebert took them up on it. One friend “had an old Mexican guitar lying around, and I began to play it. With all the Hispanic influences there, I heard a lot more Latin and flamenco music. I began to perform in hotels and restaurants, and things just took off.

“What happened to me was, having grown up in the city and lived there most of my life, the sudden quiet and the combination of the cultures there--Indian and Spanish mixed with Anglo--all of those things began to enter and mix in my music.”

This mix of cultural influences led to a mix of historical influences as well. On the TV program, Liebert calls attention to his blend of old and new technologies by dubbing his two percussionists “future man” and “ancient man.” Future man, Carl Coletti, plays an electronic drum kit that triggers a synthesizer; ancient man, Ron Wagner, plays an Egyptian dumbak and Indian tablas that date back hundreds of years.

Liebert said he combined the percussion instruments “very consciously and for two reasons. I wanted to get away from having a stage drummer so that the pure acoustic guitar sound would come through. You have to use a lot of microphones with a drum kit, and it tends to overshadow everything else. I was looking for a different sound and the samples [from the drum synthesizer] could do so many things.

“And I wanted a sense of history, old and new, in the music. Both the tablas and the dumbak were very influential on the flamenco movement. The Gypsies originally were from India and the dumbak came with the Moors, who had a tremendous impact on Spanish culture.”

Liebert’s blend of technology extends to his guitars as well: He plays an electric guitar on one tune in the show, “the same guitar I played when we opened for Ministry in Boston,” he noted with a laugh.

After one particularly involved exchange on screen between Liebert and his band, he is heard calling musicians “junkies” for the high they get playing with each other.

“That feeling of coming together is addictive,” he said during the phone call. “When you hit the right notes one after another without stopping, you’re connected with things in a deeper way. We’ve been touring with Santana, and he has come out and played with us or brought us on to play with him. And though we’d never rehearsed, we just hit it off. It was something really special, a very special high.”

* “Wide Eyed + Dreaming” with Ottmar Liebert and Luna Negra is being shown tonight at 10 on KOCE-TV Channel 50.