page_title: Michael Laucke
section_title: Style and influences
hierarchical_section_title: Michael Laucke / Style and influences
caption_attribution_description: On stage in the 10th anniversary concert in Canada's venerable concert hall, the celebrated Place des Arts. Photo by Dave Bradley, executive assistant to Michael Laucke. If you use this photo, you must use the correct attribution, which is at least: Michael Laucke at Place des Arts.
context_page_description: Michael Laucke is a Canadian classical, new flamenco, and flamenco guitarist and composer, and a music industry businessman. Starting at the age of thirteen, Laucke gave professional snooker demonstrations and his winnings allowed him to take trips from Montreal to New York City to study the classical guitar with Rolando Valdés-Blain. Still active in a career spanning five decades, Laucke began performing in 1965, recording the first of 16 albums in 1969, and has toured in 25 countries. In 1971, he performed his first of many concerts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. His first concert in New York, where he also first met Senator Claiborne Pell, took place in 1972.
  Laucke was introduced to complex flamenco techniques by Spanish guitarist Paco de Lucía when the two shared a loft and performed together for the jet set in New York City in the early 1970s. In 1982 he was selected by Andrés Segovia to perform for the PBS network at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Laucke subsequently became Segovia's pupil, and also studied with other classical guitar players, including Julian Bream and Alirio Díaz.
context_section_description: Laucke's classical/flamenco musical style is a blend of his classical studies with Bream, Segovia, Valdès-Blain, and his friendship with de Lucía. Although classical and flamenco guitar are two quite different musical styles, Québec's French-language newspaper Le Soleil chronicled Laucke's feelings and reasoning about performing both.
  Since the classical guitar is limited, you eventually look for something else. I was doing flamenco, and I love it. There are more varied techniques in flamenco; just in the right hand alone, we have 20 of them.
  I would like flamenco to become the new jazz! Flamenco has everything that it takes to follow in the footsteps of jazz and become a language to people of all countries and all cultures. We forget that before being a universal language, jazz was only the mode of expression of blacks in New Orleans! Like jazz, flamenco is based on improvisation and dialogue between instrumentalists. And flamenco is something even more, since players also interact with the dancers.
  (English translation)
  His blend of the classical and flamenco styles, sometimes referred to as "new flamenco" (nuevo flamenco), led music critic Eric McLean of the Montreal Gazette to proclaim: "It is Laucke's interest in flamenco that makes him special: He might be called the first interpreter of flamenco music, in the sense that he borrows these traditional works by Sabicas, Carlos Montoya and Paco de Lucía, and employs them in his own fashion, a practice to which they agree." Laucke summarized: "The Spanish guitar remains my first love. The flamenco guitar is my passion." According to The Music Scene magazine published by Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN), he is one of "five of Canada's best-known soloists" and the Canadian federal and provincial governments gave him "full recognition as the person who has done more for the guitar in this country than anyone else".
caption: Laucke with his group at Place des Arts – Montreal
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