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Written in fRoots issue 204, 2000


TAPIA ETA LETURIA & AMURIZA
Bizkaiko Kopla Zaherrak
Elkarlanean Triki KD-540 (1999)

JEXUX ARTZE, PELLO DE LA CRUZ, MIKEL ARTOLA, IKER MUGURUZA
Sakanatik Arbaila Ttipira
Elkarlanean KD-521 (1999)

MIKEL LABOA
Gernika Zuzenean 2
Elkarlanean KD-547 (1999)

Three significant albums that between them touch many of the major points of Euskal (Basque) musical culture.

      Singing has always been an important constituent of the music of leading trikitixa (melodeon and tambourine) duo Joseba Tapia and Xabier Berasaluze “Leturia”, and on Bizkaiko Kopla Zaherrak they deliver a full set of dance-songs from the province of Bizkaia - traditional floating verses, non-narrative slices of life, that have linked up in the songs sung as people danced. They were chosen by Xabier Amuriza, who is a bertsolari, a practitioner of the Euskal bardic art of improvising song lyrics.
      Very straightforward and upfront, just the voices of the trio and guests accompanied by exuberant surging, skittering trikitixa with some mandolin or guitar from Bixente Martinez and Mixel Ducau, it’s an album of great vitality that excellently exemplifies the heart of Euskal music, the shape and rhythm of the village and street musics that are still a key sound of Euskadi, one which is even more prominent nowadays since the evolution of triki-pop, in which Tapia in particular has been greatly influential.

      Another key aspect of the musical psyche of Euskadi, if rather less immediately accessible than trikitixa, is txalaparta. A number of hefty wooden planks, two or more, are laid across suitably padded supports and hit by two players facing one another holding, vertically, thick wooden batons. It’s not a marimba; the planks don’t really have specific clear notes, but each rings higher, lower or between the others, and the tone is affected by where they’re hit - more resonant in the middle, more distant towards the ends. It’s a very specifically collaborative instrument, the two players musically empathising to create complex interlocking rhythm and pitch patterns.
      Txalaparta was close to a dying art by the 1960s, when Jexux Artze and his brother became interested and learned to play from the Zuaznabar brothers. Later, finding he’d hit something of a block if he just stuck to what he’d learned, Jexux started to expand the rhythms of the horse-gallop patterns, “ttakuns”, and found new possibilities. Sakanatik Arbaila Ttipira is an album whose treasures may not be apparent on first listening but which contains music rooted far back in a remarkable old culture that imbues even the most modern aspects of Euskadi’s current artistic upsurge. It features txalaparta on its own, usually with two players, and also on some tracks interfacing with other instruments - Iñaki Salvador’s jazzy piano or txistu, ttun-ttun (string drum) and mouth-whistling from Mixel Etxekopar - and on a couple of tracks voices, of a group of children and of Mikel Laboa. The album opens and closes with txalaparta-like music on the church bells of the village of Arruazu, played by the man who has inherited the skill and distinctive Arruazu style, Tomas Ganboa.

      Txalaparta may be old-rooted, but it has much in common with modern minimalism and avant-garde-ism, a music to set beside the bold work of Euskal visual artists or Bilbao’s dramatic new Guggenheim Museum, and it’s no accident that Mikel Laboa is involved. It’s hard at first, listening to his thin and wavering voice, to understand just how central this quiet man has been, and continues to be, in linking together Euskadi’s past and present, folk art and “high culture”. He’s treasured, if perhaps not always completely understood, by just about everyone. Gernika - Zuzenean was recorded, apart from a couple of studio fixes, at a concert in Donostia (San Sebastian) of works gathered together by Laboa, but not all featuring him.
      The first part opens with a confusion of Laboa’s and other voices speaking Euskara over a repeating traditional trikitixa motif from Iker Goenaga and Tapia in a version of Goenaga’s tribute to the sad but valuable life of trikitilari “Elgeta”, followed by Josetxo Silguero and Pascal Gaigne’s baritone sax and electronics treatment of a traditional song collected by Laboa. He sings a Bernardo Atxaga poem to his simple guitar and the piano of Iñaki Salvador. The latter joins Jexux Artxe and Pello de la Cruz in a piece from their txalaparta album, then finally Laboa sings behind Izaskun Ellakuriaga’s reciting of a poem.
      Part two consists of three pieces by Laboa featuring his singing and speaking voice surrounded by Carlos Puig’s powerful orchestral and choral work - Txoria Txori, a song he wrote in the 60s which has gained great popular currency, Baga-biga-higa, based on onomatopoeic traditional verses, and Gernika, an almost Miklós Rózsa-like requiem for the town bombed into eternal Euskal memory during the Civil War.
  

© 2000 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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