SOINU SINFONIKOA

Published by DEIA, August 18, 2011



It’s the middle of the night, Tuesday August 16. I get up and it’s 3 in the morning. I turn the TV on and a gentleman is reading the Tarot cards. A great many of people would wish to know which is going to be their future, according to them, to be able to take the correct decisions in their life. Is the future written out? What a fantastic mystery! Just image when I started to "play" with that old trikitixa, with one or two broken-down buttons, if somebody would have been able to tell me the essential point that it would be for me in my life. Seated in the living room, I look back on my long and fascinating career that I have taken to stub with this bellows of hell behind my back and I awake up from that journey with the vertigo of facing in a few hours a new project: Recording next to the Symphony Orchestra of Basque Country, directed by Enrique Ugarte, some of the most important themes of my career. Of course the idea impassions me and at the same time it is a hoped-for project years ago. It is not easy to try to join two worlds like the one of classical music with the folk music or more traditional. Few times they interweave. We already work side by side previously in a concert officiated at the Kursaal of Donostia, but now we are going to ruffle up the curl and to make together, in a different and more innovative way, the themes selected for such project, side by side, that will be from those beginning songs that accompany me from the very start of my music career till the last new album Ultramarinos & Coloniales. Definitively, we want to achieve a high-quality music and energy album filled with illusion, effort and lots of talent. Who would have said year’s ago that a trikitixa would be seen accompanied by the whole symphony orchestra? I´m so excited thinking about that, aside from being new recording album, we are also creating new roads to explore, as much in classical music as in traditional one, uncovering new frontiers to an instrument like the trikitixa. I hope that between all of us we will be able to materialize all the unique and special moments that we are going to live thanks to the music. Now if the future of today was written or not in the present of yesterday, it’s the least important. Break a leg!!!!

www.kepajunkera.com

BAOBAB

Published By DEIA, August 11, 2011


It's sure that there was a time in the awakening of man in which no one felt out of place in nature. Today, one of the biggest problems of the human being is feeling that he does not belong anywhere, neither to a family, nor to a place and not even to nature. And, curiously, I suppose that as in other rules of life, instead of searching to return to that link of union with what we are, we have tried to solve the problem by making the surroundings adapting to us, losing totally the north of the things.

How have I come to this conclusion? After reading an article of a tree that lives almost exclusively south of the Sahara desert and that has lived 3,000 years, reaching its truck to measure more than 30 meters of diameter.

It is the Adansonia Digitata or African Baobab. The odd thing of this tree is that it reaches those giant-sized thicknesses having grace at not having a high height. Living where this arboreal species lives it has specialized in the storage of enormous quantities of water inside, converting itself into something like an enormous barrel, capable of containing up to 120,000 liters of the liquid element. This tree is a true treasure because we achieve monkey's bread; a fruit with great quantity of vitamin C, of the bark; a fiber with which strings and baskets are manufactured, from his boiled leaves food, while from his wet pollen glue is obtained.

Because of its strange appearance, the baobab has been creditor of many African legends among them one is that everyone who drinks the water in which its seeds have gotten wet will be protected against the attack of the crocodiles or that the one, who extracts a flower from the tree, will die devoured by a lion. Besides their hollow trunks have served as jail, house and even like the one of Limpopo ( South Africa ) as a bar, being able to hold in its interior 40 people.

We try to subdue the surroundings to our needs, without realizing that the path is in finding what we are and in that way we’ll be able to enjoy all the baobab of our existence has to offers us.

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ARTZAI JAUSIAK

Published by DEIA, Agosto 4, 2011



Traveling around the world, in addition to pleasurable, is one of the most enriching activities that one can do. Meeting people, places, habits and cultures entails an almost constant discovery of different worlds.

Some weeks ago I talked about Rogelio Botanz, a Basque that settled in the Canary Islands and that is a true expert in the Siblo gomero (a canary island whistling language). In one of those trips that I visited the islands, Rogelio invited me to accompany him in a documentary recording about the "Salto del Pastor” (Jump of the Shepherd). It is called the Salto del Pastor or, more colloquially, the Brinco (Jump Over), they move around the mountains with the help of a stick that is around 2 to 4 meters long, ending with a metallic tip. It is a traditional practice that the shepherds of the Canary Islands have used to move through those so abrupt payments. It seems incredible to observe how jumpers run through incredible slopes, accomplishing amazing leaps, thanks to the use of the pole that, nailed firmly to the ground and used like a rod for them to slide down arriving to the ground, allows to carrying out such exploits.

Although it is not well know the origin of the Jump of the Shepherd, one knows that already the guanaches (refers to the aboriginal inhabitants of the island) used this technique in their displacements. Talking to Rogelio he commented me that the most spectacular leaps, according to the elders, took place, not in the steep mountains and cliffs, but the shepherds, far from using it only for work, used this technique to date. They would go up to the church’s bell tower, they waited until the girl they were interested pass by, they would toss a coin to the ground and immediately afterwards they let themselves fall, nailing down the lance tightly where they had thrown the coin and sliding their body beside the pole smoothly down to the ground. Skillful action, target and courage, a full demonstration of manliness to call the lady's attention.

Once again, the proof of the human being’s need to compete to evolve. We all react giving our maximum when we spark competitiveness off, even when one is the more daring one of all, the one of ourselves.

www.kepajunkera.com


www.kepajunkera.com