From music to food, to Boise’s Basque Block and the Jaialdi Festival, to the Trailing of the Sheep in Ketchum, Basque culture plays a big role in southern Idaho and Dan Ansotegui has played an important role in promoting that.
Ansotegui teaches the traditional Basque push button accordion music that accompanies many of these community events.
“I teach that to a mid-sized group of people from the age of eight is our youngest, and our oldest is pushing 80,” said Ansotegui. “We started teaching our Basque button group about 20 years ago.”
For more than a century, Basques have immigrated to Idaho, seeking land and other opportunities. Ansotegui follows a lineage of family that came to Idaho at the turn of the century and joined a vibrant and growing Basque community.
“Basques in Idaho came from a very small region within the entire Basque Country,” Ansotegui said. “All four of my grandparents grew up in a three kilometer-radius of the town of Ibarrangelua, and many Basques in Boise came from that same area because of the poverty line and the fact that they needed to find work.”
Once in Idaho, his family herded sheep and ran a bar and boarding house in Sun Valley. His father played accordion and drums at community dances. Ansotegui was immersed in American Basque culture in the largest community of Basques outside of Spain — the Treasure Valley.
“Basque culture was something that we grew up with without even realizing it was anything different than other people had,” he said.
Though surrounded by Basque music from an early age, Ansotegui didn’t become a musician himself until he was inspired by travels to the Basque Country in Spain.
“I was able to go to the town of Oñati in the Basque County that Dr. Pat Beiter had organized,” he said. “That’s where I learned Basque and I also began to learn the txistu. Txistu in Basque just means ‘whistle.’”
A dancer in the long-standing Basque traditional dance group, the Oinkaris, Ansotegui didn’t have many opportunities to continue playing the txistu. The flute is played for boys’ dances, and he was always dancing.
His travels to the Basque Country also inspired the creation of some of Boise’s most-loved Basque restaurants, including Bar Gernika, a cozy corner pub that serves chorizo and croquettas found in the Basque Country, alongside American Basque creations like the Lamb Grinder, a lamb sandwich Ansotegui invented based on the foods of his own upbringing.
Lamb isn’t a traditional food in Europe, but for Idaho Basque shepherds it became a staple at the dinner table.
Ansotegui’s cohort of students who traveled to the Basque Country brought back inspiration to collaborate and develop Boise’s Basque Block. They also began a huge festival in the City of Trees that brought in Basques from around the world – Jaialdi. Jaialdi fostered even more intercultural exchange between the old and the new country.
And it was after the 1990 Jaialdi festival in Boise that Ansotegui learned how to play the button accordion.
Ansotegui and others were beginning to realize that their parents’ generation wouldn’t always be around to play music for the dances that regularly brought their Basque community together.
“I just really wanted to learn button accordion,” he said. “I love the looks of it. I love the sound of it much more than I did the piano accordion. A different instrument plays different music and it play it differently, but it just kind of lends itself to a different style of music.”
He picked up the instrument for his own amusement and connected with others passionate about Basque music – several bands followed through the years. And the bands Ansotegui formed played traditional Basque songs and kept the music alive, mixing the ancient tunes with more modern notes at community dances.
Not only did Ansotegui engage his community through performance, he also dedicated time to teach others accordion and traditional songs. He even developed a style of tab for the accordion to teach those who aren’t music readers. Having taught the music for 20 years, he explains it effortlessly.
“A Jota is a Basque version of a Spanish Fandango. It’s done in the same time as a waltz, but it’s much quicker,” he said. “It has a feeling of almost like a triplet. So it’s written like a waltz, but it has the feeling of a march.”
Three generations later, Ansotegui doesn’t question why the Basque culture continues to be a force in Idaho. For his part in continuing Basque traditions, Ansotegui was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2019.
“I think that’s kind of what Basques have been really good at, is keeping their culture and yet allowing it to change and still remain Basque.”Dan Ansotegui
“I think that’s kind of what Basques have been really good at, is keeping their culture and yet allowing it to change and still remain Basque,” said Ansotegui. “It’s a different Basque, but because of the fact that we had different resources here, and we had different needs – it changed quite a bit. And yet it was always, with the music and with the food, we always knew where the origins were.”
This piece was produced for Expressive Idaho in partnership with the Idaho Commission on the Arts’ Folk and Traditional Arts Program, with funding support from the National Endowment for the Arts and Suzanne Allen.
