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Written in Folk Roots issue 173, 1997

ALAITZ ETA MAIDER
Alaitz Eta Maider
Triki-Elkar KD 468 (1997)

MAIXA TA IXIAR
Mantalgorri
Triki-Elkar KD 467 (1997)

TAPIA ETA LETURIA BAND
Ero
Elkar KD 466 (1997)

There’s a wave of fun coming out of Euskadi. Traditional roots, language and pop music are combining in a phenomenon much more likely to have people enjoying who they are and where they are than any amount of furrowed-brow politicism. And this is the sort of fun which transmits across language barriers - it beckons rather than alienates.
      And what’s at the foaming curl of this wave? Er, button accordions. Accordions and women. Women playing accordions, and singing.

      Back a bit for a moment. A few years ago the Euskal trikitixa (accordion) tradition began to be spurred onward by the young players going in for competitions and writing new tunes - two of them in particular, Joseba Tapia and Kepa Junkera. Both moved into new wide-ranging musical influences and contexts for their instrument, but they keep and if anything intensify its Euskal character, and both have had a strong influence. Tapia and tambourinist Leturia jumped into the rough world of street-cred rock music, and the result has been not only the development of their own brand of strong Euskal pop, but the creation of a climate where others can flourish.
 
      Further, there was a time when women in Euskadi were rarely seen as performers, neither as singers nor as trikitilariak. Now there are the likes of Alaitz Telletxea with Maider Zabalegi, and Maixa Lizarribar with Ixiar Oreja. The fresh, attractive, accessible and poppy music they make isn’t polite and it isn’t hidebound. They use whichever pop instrumentation works, but in there is the skittering triki, rattling panderoa and ululating irrintzi yells.
      Alaitz eta Maider are the newest appearance on the recording scene of the three here, and their debut album of lively, tuneful songs and a bunch of tunes is as good a place as any to start to get a sense of what’s happening. Tapia co-produced, and his style is audible in the tune-writing; his is a new branch to the tradition, and it’s budding energetically.
      Mantalgorri is Maixa ta Ixiar’s third album, this time co-produced and engineered by long-time Elkar associate Jean Phocas. Guitarist Jorge Gonzalez, bassist Garbiñe Sagastibeltza and drummer Karlos Aranzegi (replacing Marie Hélène) make up the current band; all played on 1996’s Uhinez Uhin (featured on Froots #8) and this album develops on that, confidently in the thick of what is clearly a new Euskal pop. Cheeky, physical lyrics, too.

      The graphics of Ero show the Tapia eta Leturia band in strait-jackets, which, of course, is far from their musical attitude. In this, promised to be their second and last in this style which the press-release calls “rock-crossover”, they cheerfully cruise the pop musics of the world, grabbing ideas heavy, funky, rappy, African, and twisting them into their strengthening Euskal cable.
     

© 1997 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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