Ottmar Lieber returns to PAC on Sunday

German-born Ottmar Liebert is an internationally celebrated flamenco guitarist. He’s been nominated for five Grammys, and his first album, “Nouveau Flamenco,” from 1990, is one of the best-selling instrumental albums of all time—14 times platinum in the U.S.A./Latin category, double platinum in the U.S. overall, platinum in Australia and New Zealand, and gold in Mexico and Canada.

While flamenco guitar is his specialty, his music perhaps is more recognized for the way it combines flamenco with jazz, bossa nova, Hindu meditation chords, rock, the blues, traditional Iraqi Oud songs, classical cello, Afro-Peruvian rhythms, Brazilian samba and everything in between.

This protean approach to music is not surprising for a man who grew up in Germany to a Chinese-German father and a Hungarian mother, and who has spent his life traveling the world. His personality also reflects a certain openness to experimentation and versatility. Even when asked if he has a favorite venue in which to perform, he paused.

“That’s sort of like asking me, ‘What’s your favorite type of woman?’ I couldn’t tell you. My girlfriends have been dark-haired and light-haired, tall and short.”

On Sunday, Mr. Liebert will be playing at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center, a venue he said he always looks forward to both for the acoustics and the crowd: he performed there in 2001, 2005 and 2007. For truly devoted fans, he will continue on from Westhampton to play five consecutive shows at Manhattan’s Blue Note jazz club.

Mr. Liebert started his music career in the United States in Boston in his early 20s, playing in rock bands for a rather edgier crowd: his band opened for the industrial metal band Ministry. In 1986, ready for a break from the East Coast, he took a trip driving a van cross-country to Santa Fe, New Mexico, with an artist friend. Twenty-three years later, he still calls the Southwest city home.

Once there, he decided he wanted to rethink what he wanted to do with music. He found a “really bad Mexican guitar lying around and just started playing with it,” he said. “It was like meeting an old friend I hadn’t seen in 20 years.”

He saw an ad in a newspaper looking for a guitar player for a restaurant and offering $20 and a meal for the night’s work. “It was as simple and basic as it could be, but I thought, why not? and just wanted to see where it went from there.”

Three years later, after learning from a flamenco guitarist who had spent years in Spain, Mr. Liebert recorded the huge hit album “Nouveau Flamenco,” and, while on tour for the album, opened for Miles Davis. “It was pretty intimidating,” he said, considering his sudden rise to fame.

At Sunday night’s show at the Westhampton Beach PAC, Mr. Liebert will be playing with his band, Luna Negra—members have changed over the years but generally include a bassist, drummer, percussionist and a second guitar—and said he will play from his new album, “The Scent of Light,” as well as songs from the last 20 years.

Since 1990, Mr. Liebert and the various incarnations of his band have recorded and produced more than 20 albums. He owes this prolific body of work to simply enjoying his work. “This is what I like to do. I also enjoy putting myself into different and new situations, so I find that inspiring.”

For guitar aficionados, flamenco guitar is a well-appreciated genre. “Some jazz guitar players even say that flamenco is the most complete technique for guitar, because there is so much you can do with it rhythmically and melodically. It’s played with the fingers,” he said, “so you’re not stuck just with a pick.”

Flamenco originated in Spain, but not with the gypsies, as many people think, but with the Moors from Northern Africa who controlled southern Spain in the 12th and 13th centuries. Mr. Liebert explained that the Moors brought to Spain the Oud around 1100, which became the lute in the Middle Ages. Europeans than contributed harmony and the well-tempered scale. “Somewhere along the line, the lute became a guitar, which is lighter to carry and easier to play,” he said.

Mr. Liebert is one of the original musicians in the movement of contemporary flamenco, or nouveau flamenco, which takes flamenco guitars, scales and rhythms and fuses them with genres and music from all over the world. He said his music attracts a large variety of people from young to old, from people who like Latin music to people who like jazz or world music. Likewise, he said that depending on the venue, the crowd goes from quiet and contemplative to certain clubs, “where people get a hell of a lot louder and start dancing around.”

Despite spending more time in Santa Fe than anywhere else in the world, Mr. Liebert said, “I really feel the same way I felt when I was 16,” and living in Germany, but traveling often. “I feel like a citizen of the world.”

The Westhampton Beach PAC show on Sunday, May 10, starts at 8 p.m. Tickets range from $40 to $70. For more information, call the PAC box office at (631) 288-1500, or visit online at whbpac.org.