Juan Martin

Hailing from Andalucia in Spain, acoustic guitar master Juan Martín commands the style that local musicians call nuevo flamenco, meaning a contemporary and expansive form rather than a strictly traditional one. This approach diverges from conventional flamenco much as jazz-rock fusion departs from pure jazz; rather than replicating the work of earlier traditionalists, Spain’s nuevo flamenco players deliberately broaden the idiom’s boundaries. Martín, whose surname is pronounced Mar-teen, has nonetheless drawn lasting inspiration from flamenco’s classic exponents as well as from the Spanish classical guitar lineage, with Paco de Lucía, Tomatito, and the legendary Andrés Segovia ranking among his primary influences.

His creative frame of reference extends well beyond either traditional flamenco or Spanish classical guitar, however. Although Martín remains rooted in flamenco, he rejects any purist stance and instead treats the form as an open medium that can merge freely with jazz, Brazilian samba, Afro-Cuban salsa, or Argentinean tango. Latin American sensibilities constitute a central wellspring for him, a fact mirrored in pieces such as “Cuba y España” (“Cuba and Spain”) and “Bossa Rumba.” His largely instrumental recordings therefore speak to admirers of Paco de Lucía and Tomatito while simultaneously attracting listeners drawn to Joe Pass and to the late Brazilian guitar virtuoso Laurindo Almeida, whose pioneering fusion of samba and cool jazz places him among Martín’s non-Spanish influences.

Martín began assembling a discography during the 1980s, issuing several albums on RCA’s Novus imprint, among them Through the Moving Window and 1986’s Painter in Sound. Although Novus operated chiefly as a jazz label at the time, Martín’s jazz-inflected sensibilities allowed him to fit comfortably within its roster; over the years he has also shared stages or studios with such jazz figures as tenor and soprano saxophonist Wayne Shorter, Brazilian vocalist Flora Purim, and her percussionist husband Airto Moreira. He supplied further recordings to the Alex label in the early-to-mid 1990s, then recorded prolifically for the independent Flamenco Vision imprint during the late 1990s and early 2000s. By the beginning of 2005 his catalog comprised at least sixteen albums.