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Written in fRoots issue 257, 2004


VARIOUS ARTISTS
The Alan Lomax Collection – The Spanish Recordings – Basque Country: Biscay and Guipuzcoa
Rounder CD82161-1772-2 (2004)

VARIOUS ARTISTS
The Alan Lomax Collection – The Spanish Recordings – Basque Country: Navarre
Rounder CD82161-1773-2 (2004)

IBON KOTERON
Airea
Elkar KD 646 (2004)

In August and December 1952 and January 1953 Alan Lomax and his assistant Jeannette Bell recorded music in three of the four Basque provinces that are within the Spanish border. With no prior knowledge of Basque, nor indeed Iberian, traditional music, what they encountered was the result of advice and help by local contacts and general musical nose-following. It’s by no means a complete survey; no txalaparta, for example, and the recordings of toberak, txalaparta’s metal equivalent, were lost. But, as recompiled here with some material not on the original LPs, these tracks, a total of seventy-one on the two CDs, are rich with the shapes, texture and variety of Basque music.
      On both discs there’s a lot of singing, full of character – solo voices including verse-improvising bertsolaris, duets, loose assemblages, folk chorales, ululating irrintzis, the cry of a blind lottery-ticket seller - as well as the high reed sound of alboka, the strident shawm tones of dulzainas, the three-holed whistles txistu and silbote, skittering tambourine and rattling snare-drum.
      If your image of archive field recordings is as a worthy, scratchy listen – well, these aren’t like that. Lomax was a good recordist, and with the CDs’ remastering these sound like they were recorded yesterday, and the material on them is full of life. And the booklet notes, new-written for these releases largely by the Basque musician and teacher Juan Mari Beltran (whose 2002 CD Arditurri is a key work of present-day Basque traditional music), are as excellent as one would expect from him, not just dealing with the recordings but giving an authoritative overview of traditional music and instruments. With Aintzane Camara, Beltran also tracked down and interviewed many of the original performers.

      Despite the pressures of Franco’s fascist dictatorship in the middle of the 20th century, much of the music and traditions recorded here live on, still a part of celebratory life in Euskal Herria. But even though the dulzaina and drums and the rest still animate the streets during celebrations, music worldwide has become a thing that pumps competitively out of loudspeakers, and so attention is turned to ways of making music that can elbow its place on the CD-player at home and abroad, and many of today’s Basque musicians are involved in that process..
      The alboka is an iconic instrument in Basque music. Running across a curved, decorated handle, a cow-horn at one end of the instrument acting as a reed-chamber and a second at the other end as its acoustic bell, are two parallel tubes, each with a single reed. One has five holes, the other three, so by fingering across the two, the player, who uses circular breathing, can play harmonies, as if it were a double-chantered bagpipe. Ibon Koteron is alboka’s leading present-day player. On Airea he’s joined, in music mostly co-written with producer Kepa Junkera, by other reed and reedy-sounding instruments including Armenian duduk, Finnish reed horns, Sardinian launéddas, trikitixa and Gilles Chabenat’s hurdy-gurdy, with txalaparta cast in the role of thudding, wood-pattering rhythm section, and vocals from Galician pandeiretera group Faltriqueira and Corsican female vocal trio Soledona.
      The melodies draw partly on Basque forms including the 5/4 zortziko rhythm, and the dominant sounds are of alboka and txalaparta, so what emerges can’t fail to have some Basque character while making links with other traditions, and it’s good to have the alboka championed, but the album is short on strong, distinctive tunes; most have the feel of being built up from a rhythm track. And unexpectedly, given such notable players and potentially wild instrumental resources, despite the preponderance of up-tempo the whole thing has a measured, careful pace with a curious, suppressing lack of fire and energy. It’s a significant project, nevertheless.


© 2004 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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