Lone Piñon

Lone Piñon is a New Mexican string band, or “orquesta típica”, whose music celebrates the integrity and diversity of their region's cultural roots. With fiddles, upright bass, guitars, accordions, vihuela, and bilingual vocals, they play a wide spectrum of the traditional music that is at home in New Mexico.

The Norte has long been a crossroads of cultures, and centuries of intersecting histories, trade routes, migrations, and cultural movements have endowed the region with an expansive and rich musical heritage that weaves together Spanish, Mexican, Indigenous, European immigrant, Anglo-American, and Afro-American musical influences. The oldest strands of this tradition have survived in continuity, renewed by each new generation’s contribution to core style and repertoire that has been passed from musician to musician, in some cases over many centuries. Though rapid cultural change since the ‘50s has led to these sounds becoming scarce in their home territory, they never fully disappeared--thanks to the elders and past generations that lovingly and tenaciously carried them forward, renewing the voice of their musical ancestors at each step into changing circumstances.

The musicians of Lone Piñon learned from elder musicians who instilled in them a respect for continuity and an example of the radicalism, creativity, and cross-cultural solidarity that has always been necessary for musical traditions to adapt and thrive in each generation. In 2014, Lone Piñon was founded as a platform for creativity around the oldest sounds of traditional New Mexico string music, sounds that had all but disappeared from daily life in many Northern New Mexico communities. Through relationship with elders, study of field recordings, connections to parallel traditional music and dance revitalization movements in the US and Mexico, and hundreds of local and national performances, they have brought the language of the New Mexico orquesta típica back onto the modern stage, back onto dance floors, into a contemporary aesthetic/artistic conversation, and into the ears of a young generation.

The musical landscape of Northern New Mexico bears the record of interconnecting musical movements that cross state, national, generational, and ethnic borders. Lone Piñon’s active and recorded repertoire reflects that complexity, and has included a wide range of regionally-relevant material (Western swing, conjunto, New Mexican Spanish and Mexican ranchera, Central Mexican son regional, country, onda chicana, etc.) around the core New Mexican violin and accordion-driven polkas, cunas, inditas, valses, and chotes learned from elders.

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JORDAN WAX
(violin, piano- and three-row accordions, mandolin, guitar, vocals) grew up in Missouri and was traditionally trained by master Ozark fiddler Fred Stoneking and Central Missouri dance fiddler John White. He worked as bandleader and accordionist for a Yiddish dance band before his work with Missouri and New Mexican fiddle styles inspired him to travel to Mexico for a 6-month immersion in Mexican huapango fiddling, where he studied with Rolando "El Quecho" Hernandez of Trio Chicontepec, Casimiro Granillo of Trio Chicamole, and a variety of local fiddlers in the Huasteca region of San Luis Potosí. His studies of traditional New Mexico dance music have been guided and inspired in the past years by Tomas Maes (mandolinist of Santa Fe, NM) and Antonia Apodaca (late accordionist and guitarist of Rociada, NM). In 2018 he travelled to Morelia, Michoacan for a few weeks of intensive study with master son calentano violinist Serafin Ibarra Cortez and P'urepecha elder and composer Tata Pedro Dimas. He serves the Manitos Community Memory Project as a Community Archivist digitizing and archiving New Mexico music-related documents, sound recordings, and oral histories.

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TANYA NUÑEZ
(upright bass, guitar, vocals) was born in southern New Mexico. Growing up in a musical family, no celebration was complete without music and dance: rancheras, polkas, valses and cumbias. She has worked as a bassist in a variety of traditions from classical, tango, Persian and Arabic, to country, rock and funk/soul. Though she plays many styles, the beautiful and diverse music of the Southwest US and Mexico holds a special place in her heart and she is honored to study and share it.


KARINA WILSON
(violin, viola, vocals) grew up in Glorieta, New Mexico, where she was surrounded from an early age with traditional music and dance. In addition to professionally performing and teaching classical violin and viola, her passion for traditional dance music and the roles it plays in cultural context has taken her to 23 countries/territories to work with musicians from Alaska to the Ukraine and Iceland to Guinea. She is in high demand at dances and workshops across the US and at home teaches and performs honky-tonk, old-time, classical, international folk, and regional Mexican and New Mexican traditions.

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SANTIAGO ROMERO
(guitar, vihuela, vocals) grew up in the village of Agua Fria, New Mexico, on land where his family has lived for many generations. He began learning the guitar at the age of 6 from older musicians in his community and began working as a mariachi in Las Cruces, El Paso, and Ciudad Juárez in his early twenties. He has performed and served as creative director in a variety of ensembles, taught as part of several educational initiatives and in 2005 was appointed by Governor Bill Richardson as the first New Mexico state representative of Mariachi music. In addition to his work with Lone Piñon he has served for 13 years as the director of Mariachi Sonidos del Monte, one of New Mexico’s premiere Mariachi ensembles.

Performances often include collaboration and guidance from mentors Lucy Salazar of Albuquerque (bastonera/dance leader) and Tomas Maes (elder mandolinist/dance music mentor) of Santa Fe.

In the past seven years Lone Piñon has played extensively throughout the Southwest and the US and recorded four studio albums: "Trio Nuevomexicano” (2016), "Días Felices," (2017), "Dále Vuelo,”(2019), and “Nuevas Acequias, Río Viejo: Traditional Music of Northern New Mexico”(2020). The band’s discography reflects the diversity of six years of live performances and includes recordings with past collaborator Leticia Gonzales (violin, percussion, vocals, jarana huasteca) and founding members Noah Martinez (tololoche, guitarron, bajo sexto, huapanguera, guitar) and Greg Glassman (guitar, jarana huasteca, vocals), who have since moved on to other projects but whose voices have been foundational to the existence and character of the project.

In August 2018 Lone Piñon was invited by the Library of Congress and the American Folklife Center to Washington DC, where they recorded a concert and an oral history of their work with New Mexican and Mexican musical traditions. In 2019 they were honored to teach and perform Northern New Mexico fiddle and dance alongside traditional masters from across North America and Europe at Centrum’s Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend, WA. A documentary film about their work with traditional music, “En Donde los Bailadores se Entregan los Corazones,” premiered in 2019 and won several awards at film festivals in the US, Canada, and Mexico. In 2019 the band received the Parsons Award from the American Folklife Center, which brought them back to the Library of Congress in Washington DC in 2020 to study the Library’s collection of field recordings of Northern New Mexican musicians and to record another program of music they have learned and revived from the Juan B. Rael archive.

Lone Piñon’s work to create a professional context for Northern New Mexican stringbands was supported in 2019-20 in part by the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Southwest Airlines, and the Surdna Foundation through a grant from the NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant Program, administered through fiscal sponsorship by La Sala de Galisteo, a 501c3 in Galisteo, New Mexico.