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Written in fRoots issue 263, 2005


ALBOKA
Lau Anaiak
Elkar KD-673 (2004)

XABI SAN SEBASTIAN
Orai
NO-CD CDNO 26 (2004)

HIRU TRUKU
Nafarroako Kantu Zaharrak
Metak M060CD

For its fourth album in ten years, Basque band Alboka has slimmed to its core duo of chromatic button accordionist Joxan Goikoetxea and Irish-born but long Euskadi-resident player of wind instruments including, of course, alboka, Alan Griffin. As ever, they’re joined by guests, but this time, after the Marta Sebestyén collaboration of 2001’s Lorius, they’ve invited nearer to home and they’ve made a more distinctively Basque album.
     Vocals are mainly by Xabi San Sebastian, with one contribution from Benito Lertxundi. The songs are an amalgam of traditional melodies with their own lyrics on traditional themes or rewrites. The tunes often use the jerky, odd-numbered rhythms that, though not all Basque musicians use them, are one of the distinctive features of the country’s music; a particularly fine example is Gizon Pipartzaleak (“Pipe-smoking Men”) which moves pleasingly erratically between hard to pin down rhythms possibly countable as fives, sevens and tens in no calculable regular order.

     Singer and guitarist Xabi San Sebastian has guested with Alboka for their past three albums, and they, plus a whole lot more including Mercedes Peón and txalaparta players Juan Mari Beltran, Iñigo Monreal and Oreka TX, appear on his solo debut. Orai was recorded at the same studio as Alboka’s album and with the same producer, IZ and Suso Sáiz respectively, and his material, like Alboka’s, is a mixture of tradition and new writing, but the musical approach is much less folk-band, more folk-rock-auteur. San Sebastian has a strong, hard-edged, straining declamatory voice that soars over driving rhythms and programming, singer-songwriter strummed guitar or traditional wind and string instruments and percussion. In the perkily swung question-song Maritxu he duets with Peón’s two personas, the intimate and the wild, and occasionally he too comes down to breathy and close-up as in the shuffling lullaby Botto Ninak. The characteristically Basque delivery of fast, clipped lyrics over a skipping uneven rhythm is most clearly exemplified in Ipar Haizea (“The North Wind”), with San Sebastian’s lyrics to Alan Griffin’s tune and alboka.

      Basque guitar-playing singer-songwriters are caught in a language trap if they want to communicate to the world. Naturally, and in support and development of their culture, they write and sing in their own language, Euskara, but unless the shapes and textures of their music are exotic enough to excite interest - folk instruments such as txalaparta, txistu, alboka or trikitixa can help a lot with that - it’s hard for them to make much impact on the world music scene. Ruper Ordorika is such a person, a deeply Basque artist, well-known and esteemed at home, and with plenty of outside perspective. He lived in London for some time and is familiar with, and influenced by, English folk music, including the works of Martin Carthy.
      Ordorika’s solo albums feature mainly his own songs, treated, as on his 2003 Kantuok Jartzen Ditut, in a guitar, bass and drums sort of way but with a lot of Basque character in content and melodic form. They do well in Euskal Herria but they haven’t made many inroads outside. Hiru Truku is a contrasting project, devoted to traditional material, played simply and directly acoustic. In it Ordorika is joined by trikitixa player Joseba Tapia and Oskorri guitarist-mandolinist Bixente Martinez. The trio have made three albums together and tour occasionally. In the past their material has come largely from their home Basque region of Bizkaia, but their third album, on which they’re joined lightly for some tracks by Arkaitz Miner and Xabier Zaberio’s fiddles and nyckelharpa, contains thirteen songs from Bizkaia’s larger neighbour to the south-east, Nafarroa (Navarra), a region not administered by the Basque government but nevertheless Basque.
      Carthy borrowed the tune of a song, Bakarrik Aurkitzen Naz, that he’d played with Hiru Truku on their second album, for his version of The Wife Of Usher’s Well, and one could imagine one or two melodies on Nafarroako Kantu Zaharrak likewise carrying English traditional lyrics. The role of these tunes, as normal in the ballad tradition, is as vehicles to support and make memorable the lyrics, and the latter, the essence of the songs, are for a non Euskara speaker only to be got at by reading the translations, which tell of kings, nobles, love, shepherds and dalliance, part of the European ballad and story tradition that knows no linguistic borders.


© 2005 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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