Biography

Joseba Tapia is one of the best diatonic accordion players and composers of recent years. Self-taught, for many years he formed one half of the Basque accordion and tambourine duo known as Tapia ta Leturia, which focused mainly on folk, dance and popular procession music and created a new school with an endless list of followers.

After experimenting with a number of other fields such as rock and tex-mex, for example, in 1998 he joined forces with the writer Koldo Izagirre and released an album entitled Apoaren edertasuna (The beauty of the toad), in which the artist merged literary texts with original compositions. This project marked the start of his solo career, which continued the following year with *Québec: 14 kantu independentziarako* (Quebec: 14 songs for independence), an album featuring a number of singer-songwriters from Quebec itself (Félix Leclerc, Raymond Lévesque, Gilles Vidneault, Claude Léveillée, Robert Charlebois and Paul Piché), accompanied by the accordion, guitar, violin and double bass with vocals by Tapia himself.

At the end of 2001 he brought out his latest album, Agur Intxorta maite, which features a number of unpublished and unknown songs from the War of 36. This highly acoustic work is made up of 20 songs sung in an austere, direct style with different types of accordions and voices. Tapia composed a number of melodies for the occasion which he intersperses with the styles typical of the era: tango, paso doble, passacaglia, anthems, ballads and the typical Basque dance music known as arin-arin.