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.

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.

”Lone Piñon aren’t some rinky-dink trio from the American Southwest. They can hold their own against any headliner, anywhere in the world. They’re simply that good, and they make the music of the border into something living, breathing and absolutely enticing.”

-fROOTS Magazine, UK

“…Great energy, authenticity and devotion… a nice variety of rather old-time Mexican musical rhythms. I really dug right into the first cut…”

-Chris Strachwitz, founder of Arhoolie Records

“Exceptionally good.”

— fRoots Magazine, UK

“It’s a challenge not to clap, tap, or sway along with these rhythms... Listening to this album highlights the pleasure to be derived from cross cultural relationships. These Días Felices are uplifting.”

— No Depression

“Truly exceptional… A leading ensemble committed to the preservation and elevation of the traditional musical forms of the Northern New Mexico region….an ensemble that embodies cultural integrity for the purpose of continuing treasured art forms that keep our communities thriving.”

-National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures

“They do more than bring the past to life; their vitality of presentation makes for fresh, engaging listening...”

-The Albuquerque Weekly Alibi

“They own each style with a genuine sincerity, three instruments, astonishing skills and complete dedication to their music [which] comes up, from this fresh treatment, renewed, alive and well. ...emotion and musicianship are obvious... Virtuosity is always there....Don’t miss this.”

— Le Cri du Coyote Magazine (France)

“Ultimately, you sense the band’s deep respect for the music and cultures from which it emerged, honoring its integrity with the purity of their all acoustic instrumental approach. There is no updating going on, but there is a subtle blending, like a good spice mix, as they bring their diverse backgrounds to this music. New Mexico itself, you might remember, was Mexico (along with Arizona, Texas Nevada and California) until what is called on this side of the border the Mexican-American War of 1846-47, which resulted in massive U.S. expansion. It has the highest percentage of both Hispanic and Indigenous populations of any contiguous U.S. state. But it’s also close to the Midwest and it of course borders Texas and Oklahoma. All of this is present in New Mexico, and it is present in the music of Lone Piñon as well.

But enough of academics! Lone Piñon are, first and foremost, crack musicians and singers, but the casualness of their presentation belies this expertise, instead conjuring the feel of a gathering of good friends. ”

— Don Macica of Border Radio, Chicago, IL.

Photos by Samantha Waidler.