Cook was born in Paris to Canadian parents and spent much of his early years in southern France and Spain where he first heard and picked up the elements of flamenco. After coming to Canada at age six and studying guitar at prestigious schools in Toronto and Boston, Cook continued searching for his musical voice. Eventually, he returned to Europe to learn from the masters in Andalusia, Cordoba, Granada and Madrid. There was even an awakening of sorts in Arles, France during a rooftop jam session with members of the Gypsy Kings.

Billboard classified the music of Cook’s first two CDs (1995’s Tempest and 1996’s Gravity) as “new age” but had the much better sense to put Vertigo into the “world beat” category. But these limiting classifications fail to satisfy Cook. He prefers to call his music a true amalgamation of flamenco with things like jazz, folk, rhumba and hip-hop and sounds from Africa, the Mid-East, the Indian subcontinent and Latin America, to name a few. He feels his music has “an Eastern outlook on life and a certain amount of spirituality.” 

Studying aural, rhythmic traditions from an East Indian tabla player was particularly influential, he says. “There are some really great sides to having a completely oral tradition for music. For example, your memory . . . from a Western perspective, we’re used to writing everything down,” Cook explained. “When I first started studying tabla, I was amazed at how much the teacher expected us to remember. He would play us a very complicated pattern that would go on for about a minute-and-a-half and then he’d ask us to play it back to him. And we would all scratch our heads and say, ‘you’ve got to be kidding!’

“Then he would slow down and talk to us about ways, when you are listening to music, of immediately dividing it, analysing it, breaking it down into its components so you can reconstruct it immediately, rather than listening to it.”

Cook plans more collaborations in the future so he obviously enjoyed the guests he featured on Vertigo. He recalled Harnoy’s performance in particular, partly because he had to write down every bit of music for the classically-trained cellist who wasn’t accustomed to improvising like some of his other collaborators.

“But what was amazing for me is I’m used to session players who roll in and interpret the part sort of faithfully and accurately, whereas what she did (was) somehow imbue the music with an incredible emotional intensity that just was so much greater than just the collection of notes that I had written. I was amazed that music could be so transformed through interpretation. I was really impressed by what she did.”

Cook plays his customized Takamine acoustic guitar with long, pointed fingernails coated with Krazy Glue. “That’s standard practice in the flamenco community. Paco de Lucía uses Krazy Glue and toilet paper and most people use some form of Krazy Glue and something else. Some people put a little baking powder in there . . . The nails very rarely break and when they do, we just reconstruct them.”

On the album, hunt for the ghost track Wednesday Night at Etric’s. You won’t be disappointed with the sound and feel of the spontaneous, improvised, acoustic ambiance.