NUN HAGO?

Published in DEIA, Dec. 9, 2010




All bottled up in the most important dates of the Basque culture, collecting affection and the support of a great many people. And at the same time, one great of the cultural Basque panorama has left us after a life of brawl and passion. Xabier Lete has been one of those figures that who also in time will be appraised as he should be. He was born in Oiartzun in 1944 and one of the members of that mythical group was so-called Ez Dok Amairu very discipled along with Mikel Laboa, Benito Lertxundi, José angel Irigaray, José Antonio Artze or Lourdes Iriondo. He and many others have been my teachers and in which I have gotten inspired when creating many of my albums. He was poet, singer and above all an passionate of our culture and of our essence that he protected when it was not easy to do and in which he based later on in sculpturing true works of art that grew from his talent. In the course of his life he published many works and even having political responsibilities that he had to retire because of health problems in 1985. Recovered of his sickness Xabier continued with his work as a singer and poet and received rewards and very important recognitions like the reward of Felipe Arrese Beitia poetry, granted by Euskaltzaindia, or the one of the Basque Country in Literature. All artists always have a special workart; a composition that, God knows why, reaches the public's heart. Past the years or playing hundreds of concerts, the public will always ask for that book, that song or the melody that accompanies your name. And who hasn’t listened to Xalbadorren Herio-tzean sung by Xabier? I was stunned watching him reciting and singing the ballads of the folksongs with such passion on TV. His fists tight, his teeth and mouth with tension and with that stressed mouth and his gaze that emanated "emotion". Always looking into the deep inner feeling in order to stir up and express the hidden. Gora zu XABIER!!


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Osotasunean

Published in DEIA, December 10, 2010





Here we are in Christmas season, starting off with Saint Thomas's, Christmas and New Year..... And also another year is the Durango´s Fair of the Basque Books and Music. I’m eager to be there. Lately, I have not been able to attend because of my tight and busy agenda, but this year indeed I need to feel the atmosphere of "tis the season”. Besides this year is very special for me, I will present for the first time to the public the complete Trilogy of the Basque Folk Music. There I will be in the same stand of Hiri Records, among others, the three records: Etxea, Kalea and Herria. The three chapters in which we have summarized the day's run lived during the realization of this project. It thrills me to remember many of the moments lived throughout this trip and seeing that this concluded adventure is reflected in each and every one of the 74 songs that have been recorded. 283 artists of 49 countries, infinity of producers, technicians, photographers, video cameras, managers, people of production, studios. We all have worked to the fullest; achieving a project that I am very proud of for the illusion and all hard effort everyone has put in this trilogy, demonstrating that music does not understand neither frontiers nor languages. All looking for a common goal, sharing our identity there where, somehow, we already have been present. This weekend, Durango can be a perfect starting point for this personal journey, could be with the trilogy or with any other work that there, at the fair, they will expose, which I know will be many and very good ones. I for one am happy to have finished the work. Finished? The project never ends. It finishes the effort, the dedication, but while there are people that listening and living the songs stirs up their inner feelings, I am sure that the project will continue to be alive in the most strangest and fantastic corners of our soul and of the human essence, where each and every of the journeys reside through our wandering around takes us. We’ll see you in Durango!


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BESTEEGAN

Published in DEIA, Nov. 25, 2010





I BELIEVE THAT we have become the most incoherent species of the planet. We know that the motor of our existence is our mind. It is the part of our body that tells us apart from the rest of the living beings. And even so, we have transposed all our knowledge in upgrading our lives economically, sanitary, labor level, etc., Forgetting about the most affective and sentimental part. In a primary school in the Japanese city of Kanasawa the professor Toshiro Kanamori, 57 years old, that has be teaching more than over 30 years. In Kanamori´s class, he tries to reach out the idea of the true values of life to his students and of the pursuit of happiness. Toshiro affirms that a professor's most important job is making his students learn how to experiment and sharing the different experiences lived making good use of each opportunity to express one’s individually. That way he manages to create between his students strong affective links, that allow them to be able to express each and every feeling that exist inside of them. When they laugh, the really laugh, they cry deeply and feeling everything with intensity to make them finally live life to its most. During a year, a television’s team recorded all that happened during the class of Toshiro to realize an incredible documentary that has obtained a great success. They have taught us that to express our innermost feelings makes us different - That is something that others do not do!- and because of it we, during the years, acquire a cuirass that you hedge within yourself to feel safe. This documentary demonstrates that to express what one feels produces in others empathy, complicity and that joins the people, brings them closer together. We live in a world than instead of creating bonds between us; we tie them down in order that the other one does not escape, instead of showing of who we are, or playing the necessary role to conquer the fellow being. Expressing our emotions either in public or in private is something that we are not accustomed. It is about time to change, as Toshiro says “Let the people live in your heart..." so they can live forever in our soul.


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HERRIA

Published in DEIA, Nov. 18, 2010





WHEN after an adventure that I have lived this past year and with the results in your hand to present it in public, you can feel of types of sensations. You always create a kind of profound respect of everyone's opinion towards your work. . One knows all that he has lived, felt, and even what it represents for him all that he has experienced in life, but the great question that always comes to my mind is: How do I make myself express to others and to make them have an image, the closest possible, of the outcome? Herria is one of the most special and intensive albums that I have had opportunity to present. Recorded in New York, Oakland, Paris, Casablanca, Istanbul, Athens, Boise Idaho, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Antonio Texas, Hawaii and Bilbao, this record is like the final attainment of an incredible project. In this occasion I have counted with the help, among others, of Eleftheria Arvanitaki, the voices of Chelle's and Friends, the quintet of Dave Douglas, the incredible All Nations Singers, the people of the Boise´s Choir, NOKA, Amuma Says No, the Texan music and so on, more then 130 artists of 28 countries or writers like Bernardo Atxaga and my friend Xabier Amuriza. A whole challenge of diaries, journeys, airports, taxis, education, schedules etc. Remembering the previous ones Etxea and Kalea, Herria has supposed a new turn around focus, something like curling the curl just a little more of the efforts and the complicities of it all. I do not exaggerate if I say that I am very proud of the outcome. It is not a perfect work but definitely I have counted on great collaborators and the perfect team. Result: 23 songs in which we have overturned to the last straw of what we have inside, literally emptiness, in a job that I hope will produce oceans of sensations in all those who decide to undertake this journey, around the world, just like our ancestors carried out in search of a better life. Kaixo denori, hona hemen Herria!


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SINFONÍA

Published in DEIA, Nov 11, 2010



Sometimes we have to forget what one knows to be able to imagine what he needs. At times it results more interesting how to create and discover than to compile the necessary knowledge. It is complicated to assume why the human beings becomes mentally blinded in establishing laws and concepts of almost invariable nature, knowing about the relativity of the things. While we were making a comment about the curious existing connotation between the music, mathematicians and physics, a friend of mine talks to me about the theory of The Music of the Spheres in order to try to understand the existing harmony in the universe. According to the theory, backed up by important thinkers like Pythagoras, the universe would function as a giant-sized musical instrument. Each heavenly body would broadcast a musical note in terms of the arithmetic proportions of its orbits around Earth. Something like what happens with the strings of a harp, whose tones depends on the length of each one of them. Combining the sounds of every sphere with the other ones, resounding only synchrony, so-called Music of the Spheres would be produced, that could even explain the origin of the universe. But when the German astronomer Johannes Kepler appears on scene he theorizes on what we really can say, the type of sound that emits each heavenly body, it is the velocity he moves with and not the distance that separates it from us. Today one knows that the atmosphere of the sun emits imperceptible sound waves audibly for us, but that would prove that heavenly bodies emit harmonious sounds confirming the above-cited Music of the Spheres. And again how relative that is. The more we know, the more we find out more varies our perception of what surrounds us. But there is something that remains invariable forever. The importance that it is to imagine, in creating, giving form or shape to the unknown, which is where the essences of all search is located, the absence of response.

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IRAGAN GUNE

Published in DEIA, Nov. 4, 2010


WHERE do we come from? Where do we go? Personally, I am more interested in the first one than the second. The future is still to decide and to become. I feel more attracted by the past because it is tangible, demonstrable. Our history is a succession of success and errors, of calmness and tempests that work in a cyclic way. But there is something in the past that impassions me. Where do we place the beginning of life? And who were their true main characters? Little by little, one realizes that the answers to all these questions are right in front of us. Just as to every disease supposedly has its own cure, just the same, every mystery has its explanation if we know how to look for it well, in the most unsuspected corners of our own planet. In an article of the National Geographic discovered that the Geomicrobiology Lab of the department of Geoscience of the University of Pennsylvania, USA, Jenn Macalady, is analyzing the chemical compounds and the ways of life that populate the so-called Bahamas Blue Holes. They are submarine caves in the Bahamas that simulate what could have been the land before the invasion of oxygen. It is believed that life on earth began 4 billion years ago and only 2.5 billion years that oxygen appeared on the planet. During the next 1.5 billion years the life on earth was based in lathe beings that were ignorant of the use of the oxygen as a source of energy itself. Because of conditions, these Blue Holes are the perfect ecosystem to study how life could have existed without oxygen and to solve many doubts of the beginnings. But it also opens a wide door to possible explanations to assume that the absence of oxygen does not limit the existence of life for us, not even in each and every one of the million planets that exist in the universe. At the end studying the past we create our future. What's magical of all this is carrying out an investigation over something we do not know, because it brings us closer to the true mystery, which is at the end what we feel attracted to, to the unknown.


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BIZI GOSEA

Published in DEIA, Oct. 28, 2010



Life teaches that neither the good nor the bad shows up always under the same circumstances. A while ago I experienced an incredible situation under some determined conditions, after a while you can live another one subordinate to other different ones which seems as amazing to you or even more than the previous. 15 days ago I visited the center Zabaloetxe Goikoa of Aspace in Loiu, where I had one of the most fascinating encounters with its pupils, people with cerebral palsy and other added disabilities. The act consisted in answering the questions that various pupils of the center had prepared and in return being able to be close to the ones that have the courage to face their severer disabilities in different ways, using the live music to connect with them by means of the various sensorial channels. Seeing, hearing, breathing, smelling, communicating, moving... In The Course Of life, one loses track of the importance of all these words. It’s curious to have to live extreme situations to come to realize something so evident as if life is a great gift. They say that happiness is a feeling that is experienced by contrast and I believe that in the same way consciousness is something that also grows in our inner self, or better said, awakens, because of pure contrast. I assure you that in the course of the morning I felt so many innumerable sensations that time after time I would get goose pimples. The warmth, affection, the strong emotions, indescribable, gazes, is something that I cannot put into words. Enormous! Life has to be appraised in his fair measure. So many times we blind ourselves in not being happy, we do not know how to diminish the importance of and we do not savor what we have simply for not being aware of it. When you attend to one of these events, one believes he is doing them a favor and ...Do you want to hear a secret? It’s quite the other way around. How much happiness you gave to me that day! Only I wait that this, that still it lasts... continues. If not, I can always go back to visit again. Besarkada handi bat!

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