Lone Piñon

Lone Piñon is an acoustic conjunto from Northern New Mexico whose music celebrates the integrity of their region’s cultural roots. Multi-instrumentalists Noah Martinez and Jordan Wax use the fiddle, bajo quinto, accordion, quinta huapanguera, mandolin, guitars, and vocals in Spanish, English, Nahuatl, and P’urepecha to 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. 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, they started Lone Piñon as a way to explore and strengthen the oldest sounds of traditional New Mexico string music, sounds that had all but disappeared from daily life. 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 performances, they have brought the language of New Mexico traditional music and related regional traditions back onto the modern stage, back onto dance floors, and back into the ears of a young generation. The duo’s active repertoire reflects the complexity of this musical landscape and includes early conjunto duets, contemporary New Mexican rancheras, New Mexican swing, Hispanic Texan fiddle styles, Tohono O’odham fiddle tunes from Arizona, huapangos from the Mexican Huasteca region, and several styles of music from Michoacán: son calentano and son planeco from the southern lowlands and son abajeño from the P’urepecha highlands. This program is made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts & the Washington State Arts Commission.