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Written in fRoots issue 232, 2002


AMAIA ZUBIRIA
Haatik
Elkar KD-613 (2002)

ALAITZ ETA MAIDER
Auskalo
Elkar Triki KD-612 (2002)

After a four year pause, the new album from great Euskal (Basque) singer Amaia Zubiria is her best yet.
      Her long-time collaborator Pascal Gaigne has returned to arrange and produce, and he’s put together a subtle band of piano, saxes, flutes, accordion, bass and percussion, including darabukkas, congas and a touch of txalaparta, with his own guitar, saz, mandola, zarb and keyboards. Most of the team form her live band in current shows, and they’re well conversant with styles from the spring of Euskal tradition through stately North Africanisms to sultry syncopation. Zubiria’s liquid voice floats among them in a set of songs of which two are traditional, another partly so, and the rest her own, some of them reworkings of material she co-wrote with Gaigne for their earlier duo albums. It’s a definitive work by a magnificent singer and fine writer, a true Euskal diva.

      Among those lending their voices to Amaia’s album are Alaitz Telletxea and Maider Zabalegi. A singing and songwriting trikitixa duo, playing diatonic accordeon and tambourine respectively, Alaitz Eta Maider emerged along with the likes of Maixa Ta Ixiar in the birth of triki-pop a few years ago. Their third album Auskalo shows a further maturing and crystallisation of their sound, an attractive wobbly young-girl vocal charm coupled with the dancing, spinning rhythms of trikitixa. Their triki and panderoa are augmented, and sometimes replaced, by bass, drums, electric and acoustic guitars, uilleann pipes, harmonica, xirula, txalaparta and more in a hummable, varied set of songs and tunes. Triki-pop hasn’t swept the world, nor even Euskadi, yet, but chart-fodder or otherwise this is another step in the evolution of distinctive present-day Euskal popular music.


© 2002 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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