One of the pioneers of modern Basque music, Mikel Laboa, recently died (Dec 1, 2008). Beginning in the 1960s, Laboa was a cornerstone of much that followed, from the rediscovery of traditional Basque instruments such as the alboka and the txalaparta to influencing even some of the hard rock and heavy metal bands that the […]
I’ve been meaning to share this set of links for a while and just thought I’d “dump” them on you before I either forget or they get outdated. 🙂 Last.fm, an online music station of sorts, has a channel dedicated to Kortatu and similar artists. I haven’t spent a lot of time with it yet, […]
I had never heard of the txalaparta before my first visit to Euskadi in 1991, even though I was semi-active in Basque dancing and attended many festivals in the US. In fact, I only learned about it once a friend of mine, Mikel Lopategi, who was also in Euskadi at the same time, had learned […]
David Cox pointed me to this video. Kepa Junkera is an awesome accordianist (yes, such a thing is possible 😉
Dafydd, frequent contributor and poster on the Forum posted this video in the Forum. It is a video of scenes from the Basque Country to the song Txoria Txori as sung by Joan Baez. The lyrics, as reported on many sites, are: Txoria Txori Hegoak ebaki banizkio Neria izango zen Ez zuen aldegingo Bainan, honela […]
ausArt is a Basque Classical label, specializing in 24-bit audio recordings. What does that mean? A CD — compact disc — is a 16-bit audio format. That means there is some loss in fidelity of the recording. If you use a DVD instead, you can get 24-bit audio and a higher fidelity of sound. That […]
Sometimes, learning about Basque music when you reside outside of Euskadi can be difficult. There are new media available, including streaming music on the internet, but, still, it can be difficult to really sample and discover new groups. Txema of Bilbo sent me a link to Ekaitzaldi, a blog that covers a wide range of […]
