The venue for the Sept 26 performance of Oreka TX will be Mike’s Music Exchange in Eldorado.  This is a great location for such events with a great sound system and capacity.

About Mike’s Music Exchange (from their website):

Mike’s Music Exchange is on a mission to connect local artists with our community. Our community is brimming with gifted musicians and artists that need a place to showcase their talent and share their skills and experiences with the community.

Mike’s Music Exchange is a small privately owned and operated facility in Eldorado designed to serve the needs of the community of musicians, artists, and music lovers that live in and around our great area. The Exchange is essentially four busineses rolled into one place.

For directions to Mike’s Music Exchange, see their website.

Since the 1960s, Basque folk music has seen a very exuberant revival, with the rediscovery of many traditional instruments.  Chief amongst those is the txalaparta, a device once used to communicate between the valleys, announcing weddings, deaths, and the completion of the latest sagardoa/cider batch.  Today, the txalaparta is central to a number of folk music groups, in particular the band Oreka TX.

Oreka TX has gained international fame for their skill with the txalaparta, a fame which brings them to New Mexico as part of a US tour.

On Saturday, September 25, Oreka TX will perform at Globalquerque!  For tickets and more information, check out Globalquerque’s website at 

http://www.globalquerque.com/

On Sunday, September 26, NMEE is extremely pleased to host Oreka TX for a free private event, including a live performance and then a video presentation of their travels performing with other folk groups around the world.  The venue is still being finalized; stay tuned.  Donations to help offset the costs are welcome.

UPDATE: The venue has been set.  The performance will be at Mike’s Music Exchange in Eldorado.  See their website for directions, or contact Blas at blas@buber.net.

For more information about the txalaparta, you can visit this Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Txalaparta

For more information about Oreka TX, you can visit their website at

http://www.nomadaktx.com/

Oreka TX, a Basque folk music group specializing in the Txalaparta (see this Wikipedia article), will be playing Saturday, Sept 25, at Globalquerque!

From Globalquerque’s website:

Most musical instruments are made to be played by only one musician at a time. But from Spain’s Basque Country comes an instrument built for two. The txalaparta, third cousin to the vibraphone, has entered world music circles through the efforts of the Basque duo Oreka Tx. Seeing their chosen instrument as a metaphor of musical encounters, their latest CD is a set of collaborations with musicians from India, Lapland, Mongolia and North Africa. The results are melodic, intriguing and organic, as if the duo has tapped into forgotten currents of culture that traveled the world’s trade routes in the early centuries of history.

Oreka Tx began traveling the world in 2004, using the txalaparta as their vehicle and home, meeting musicians and discovering the reality of far away peoples, from Mongolia to Sahara, from Lapland to India. During their travels, they compiled visual and audio materials with a clear goal in mind: to share this music, these sounds, these images, and these experiences. Their dream became a reality and the result was the astounding documentary, “Nömadak Tx,” which won multiple awards at international film festivals. Their touring show takes the film’s concept to the next level. With the film projected onto a giant screen behind them, the Oreka Tx Band is joined on stage by the Saharawi and Mongolian singers featured in “Nömadak Tx.” The soundtrack evolves from the blending of live and film music, and performance pieces emanate from an impossibly-expanded ensemble, the people on stage combined with the multitude of musicians all over the world on screen, an extravagant multi-ethnic sound montage. The screen itself becomes a huge window onto the world, through which the audience is offered a particularly intimate glimpse into lives, music and landscapes across the globe.