Composer- guitarist borrows styles from throughout world

For much of his career, guitarist and composer Jesse Cook saw his albums classified under a variety of genres in record stores.

“They would put me in the classical section, and then they put me in the jazz section, and then the world-music section and the new-age section,” Cook said. “It’s too bad it’s not just a big thing called ‘music.’”

Cook’s choice of instrument does not clarify matters, either: Although he performs on a flamenco guitar, his musical influences range far afield of Spain.

“If you go to Spain and you meet flamenco artists, they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s interesting, what you’re doing. What do you call that?’” Cook said. “Once you start trying to cross-pollinate it with music from South America or from Africa or the Middle East or Europe, it just starts to become something new.”

Cook’s musical diversity Who: Jesse Cook Where: Lincoln Theatre, 769 E. Long St. Contact: 614-469-0939; 1-800745-3000, www.ticketmaster. com Showtime: 8 p.m. Saturday Tickets: $24 to $40

will be on display Saturday in the Lincoln Theatre. The 53-year-old musician will be joined by a four-member band that features a second guitarist, a violinist, a bassist and a drummer.

The musician’s multinational mindset can be traced to his youth. Although his parents were from Canada, Cook was born in Paris; the family pulled up stakes for Barcelona when he was 2.

“I don’t remember it,” Cook said, “but my mum said I had this little toy guitar, which I would walk around the apartment (carrying and) singing ‘Guantanamera.’”

When Cook was 4, the family moved to Toronto, where he encountered a cacophony of cultures from which to draw inspiration.

“Toronto apparently is the world’s most multicultural city,” Cook said. “There is no group that is even remotely in a majority position.”

Lessons in flamenco guitar at an academy in Toronto began at age 6.

“I quit at 13 and went to the dark side and started playing in rock bands and jazz,” he said. “In the end, I just kept following music in all of its different incarnations.”

In time, Cook — who later received training at the Royal Conservatory of Music and York University, both in Toronto, as well as the Berklee College of Music in Boston — returned to the flamenco guitar, but he describes the instrument as a “fraction” of the sound he hopes to achieve.

“I played most of the instruments on the record. I mixed it; I wrote my string arrangements,” Cook said. “The guitar work for that album may have taken me two or three days. The album took me a year.”

Saturday’s concert will feature selections from Cook’s latest record, “Beyond Borders” (2017). The musician contrasts the message of his music with the current political debate concerning border security.

“We’re living in a time where people are getting very uppity about borders again,” Cook said. “If you can take music from different cultures and put them together and realize that they can actually all speak together and make this beautiful, harmonious thing, why can’t we do that as a people?”

Music from earlier albums will also be heard, including “Bombay Slam” from “One World” (2015).

“It’s got kind of a Bootsy Collins-esque bassline,” Cook said. “It’s got a Parliament-Funkadelic kind of groove under it and then a Bollywood string section.”

Such a musical stew might be expected from Cook, a world traveler who recently performed at a jazz festival in Saudi Arabia.

“That’s the weird world we live in,” he said, “where somebody who’s doing strange, off-the-beatentrack music like me can have an interesting following.”