Lone Piñon (Focal Point Friends of Old-Time Music)

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. Lone Piñon is Jordan Wax (violin, piano- & three-row button accordions, mandolin, guitar, vocals), Tanya Nuñez (upright bass, guitar, vocals), Karina Wilson (violin, viola, vocals), and Santiago Romero (guitar, vihuela, vocals).

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. We are pleased to welcome Lone Piñon for their debut appearance in St. Louis at The Focal Point.