Lone Piñon To Bring Their Twist On New Mexican Stringband Music To Club Passim

Lone Piñon, a four-piece acoustic ensemble from Northern New Mexico, will bring their once forgotten style of Northern New Mexico stringband music to Club Passim on July 28. Lone Piñon's music celebrates the integrity and diversity of their region's cultural roots, with fiddles, upright bass, guitars, accordions, vihuela, and bilingual vocals, all while playing a wide spectrum of the traditional music that is at home in New Mexico. Tickets are available now at passim.org. 

Since 2012, Lone Piñon has shaped its sound around the model of the orquesta típica, a style of string band music that once flourished in Santa Fe, Taos and Las Vegas, NM. By the early 2000s this music had become difficult to find, largely displaced by more commercial forms. Lone Piñon learned the tradition through direct mentorship with elder musicians whose repertoires reflected the layered cultural history of the region. 

Each arrangement reflects the lives of the band's four members (Tanya Nuñez, Santiago Romero, Jordan Wax and Karina Wilson) who interpret the material through the lens of their own generation while honoring the traditional style passed down to them. These tunes, long beloved in the Southwest, are carried forward with a deep sense of place and imagination that keeps the tradition alive. 

New Mexico's stringband music has long served as a meeting ground for Spanish, Mexican, Indigenous, Celtic-American, Afro-American and European immigrant traditions. It is a body of music that has persisted through migration, colonialism and cultural suppression. Lone Piñon's latest album, Cuatro Vidas, continues this lineage. Like the orquestas típicas that came before them, the group draws on a wide spectrum of styles shaped by the region's history as a crossroads of cultures and trade routes. Their music spans continents and centuries but remains grounded in the sounds and experience of present-day New Mexico.