CELEBRATED NEW MEXICO GROUP LONE PIÑON MARKS A DECADE WITH HOT CARNE SECA ALBUM
ALBUM HELMED BY JOEL SAVOY AND RECORDED IN LOUISIANA TO BE RELEASED MAY 29 ON JALOPY RECORDS
“Exceptionally good… 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… I really dug right into the first cut.”— Chris Strachwitz, Arhoolie Records “Uplifting… It’s a challenge not to clap, tap, or sway along with these rhythms... highlights the pleasure to be derived from cross cultural relationships.”— No Depression
“Lone Piñon is a national treasure! No other band digs so deeply into traditional New Mexican music and explores so richly the cross-cultural dialogue between these styles and the rich folk traditions south of the border. They are such commanding performers who work their audiences into a folk dancing frenzy like you wouldn't believe.”— David Wax, David Wax Museum
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.
