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
Centuries of intersecting histories, trade routes, migrations, and cultural movements have endowed the Norte region of New Mexico with an expansive and rich musical heritage that weaves together Spanish, Mexican, Indigenous, European immigrant, Anglo-American, and Afro-American musical influences. Marking a decade together, Hot Carne Seca by New Mexican string band or “orquesta típica,” Lone Piñon will be released May 29 on Jalopy Records. Lone Piñon plays music that celebrates their region’s cultural roots with fiddles, upright bass, guitars, accordions, vihuela, and bilingual vocals at venues as varied as the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, and Brooklyn Folk Fest. Lone Piñon’s repertoire has included a wide range of regional material such as Western swing, conjunto, New Mexican Spanish and Mexican ranchera, Central Mexican son regional, country, and onda chicana in addition to the core New Mexican violin and accordion-driven polkas, cunas, inditas, valses, and chotes.
Yesterday, Jalopy Records released the band’s lighthearted first single from new album Hot Carne Seca, “El Tecolote”
El tecolote constitutes a genre of its own in Northern New Mexican folk music, a set of diverse songs that all share the lament of the owl’s song somewhere in the lyrics. This tecolote melody is played in 6:8, a meter that resembles an Irish jig.
The group traveled to Eunice, LA to record with GRAMMY-winning producer Joel Savoy (Linda Ronstadt, Steve Earle, Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations and Parts Unknown, HBO’s Tremé) and capture the magic of the band playing together onstage. Savoy recorded Hot Carne Seca on vintage equipment without overdubs or multi-tracking. The band brought more vocal songs than on past albums and also incorporates more recent traditions from the latter half of the 20th century as well as tunes that have been performed for hundreds of years. T Bone Burnett said, “Everything Joel Savoy touches turns to music.”
Album highlights include “Polka Problemática,” a 20th century song learned from a 1970s home-recorded cassette by fiddler and lumber camp laborer Maximiliano Ortiz. Meanwhile, “Los Ojos de Pancha / La Felicita / Juana la Cubana” represents how Lone Piñon brings the region’s differing sounds together. A medley between a Polka ranchera and a cumbia norteña, it will be released as the album’s second single on April 28. “Juana la Cubana” was performed live by Selena [Quintanilla] in the early ‘90s. Impassioned minor-key huapango song “El Preso Numero 9” kicks off with a fast instrumental piece composed by the band before telling the story of an unrepentant prisoner about to be executed.
Another minor-key medley, “No Eras Para Mi / Czardas / De Huetamo a Pachuca” contrasts a bolero; with a piece written by an Italian and inspired by Hungarian music that became popular in central Mexico; and then closes with a virtuosic pasodoble that originates from the Michoacán Pacific Coast region of Mexico.
Tanya Nuñez (upright bass, vocals), Karina Wilson (violin, viola, vocals), and Santiago Romero (guitar, vocals) are from New Mexico, with Romero getting his start as a Mariachi musician. He was appointed by the governor of New Mexico as the first state representative of Mariachi music.
Wax — who plays violin, piano- and three-row accordions, mandolin, guitar, vocals — immersed himself in Mexico for six months to learn 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.
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, Lone Piñon has 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.
Hot Carne Seca Track Listing
1. Polka Problemática
2. El Tecolote (Cuadrilla)
3. Quiero Ver (Ranchera)
4. Los Ojos de Pancha (Polka ranchera) / La Felicita / Juana la Cubana (Cumbia norteña)
5. Cataclismo (Bolero)
6. Viva Albuquerque (Polka)
7. No Eras Para Mi (Bolero) / Czardas / De Huetamo a Pachuca (Pasodoble)
8. El Preso Numero 9 (Huapango)
9. Sunset Waltz
10. Pecos Polka
11. Nochesita
Lone Piñon Tour Dates
April 13 – Appleton, WI – Lawrence University
April 14 – Madison, WI – North Street Cabaret
April 17 – Grand Marais, MN – Up Yonder
April 18 – Lake City, MN – Oak Center General Store
June 5 – Albuquerque, NM – Winrock Park
September 25 – Sisters, OR – Sisters Folk Festival
