Lone Piñon at The Lotus

Lone Piñon is an acoustic trio from Santa Fe, New Mexico whose music celebrates their region’s cultural roots.  Using violin, guitar, guitarrón, and harmony vocals in Spanish, English, and Nahuatl, the group has revived and updated the Chicano stringband style that once flourished in New Mexico, bringing a devoted and explosive musicianship to Northern New Mexican polkas and chotes, virtuosic Mexican huapango and son calentano, and classic canciones. 

The band features three musicians whose careers have woven through a wide spectrum of roots music before converging in 2012 in Northern New Mexican music.  

Greg Glassman ( guitar, vocals ) first engaged his musical education as a clawhammer banjo player with the Gnawa musicians of Essouira, Morroco. Upon returning to North America, he began drumming for experimental jazz and Irish punk outfits, and performing rockabilly and gospel music before travelling to southern Veracruz, to study regional Mexican Son.

Jordan Wax (fiddle, vocals) grew up in Missouri and was traditionally trained by master Ozark fiddler Fred Stoneking and later apprenticed with Central Missouri dance fiddler John White.  He worked as bandleader and accordionist for a klezmer-punk brassband and helped launch Latin-ska project La Rocola Bacalao in Quito, Ecuador, and has played music in the context of rural life in Kichwa-speaking communities of Ecuador and in the Missouri Ozarks.

Noah Martinez (guitarrón) grew up in Los Ranchos de Albuquerque immersed in the music of his community: rock, orquesta tejana, Onda Latina, norteño, honky-tonk, Western swing, and the recently arrived jaranero movement that started in southern Veracruz.  His skills on upright and electric bass have made him nearly ubiquitous in the Northern New Mexican music scene. 

The trio has dedicated years to learning and performing the acoustic ensemble tradition that is at the heart of the region's musical landscape, working to reinfuse the repertoire with the vitality it lost with the passing of its most prominent musicians in the last few decades.  On stage, Lone Piñon clusters around a single microphone and digs into their repertoire with explosive abandon.  Strings are pummeled by the complex strumming rhythms of huapango, horsehairs fly from violin pyrotechnics, and the audience is propelled forward by the guitarrón-driven pulse of New Mexican polkas, inditas, and chotes.  Soaring harmony vocals in Spanish, English, and Nahuatl give voice to a musical landscape of the Río Grande del Norte that like its desert surroundings is powerful, diverse, and undeniably alive.

Though New Mexican fiddle music thrived in isolated farming valleys of the high desert, the tradition represents a forging of diverse cultures that came together in the region.  As part of a young generation of traditional musicians at home in a global, connected world, Lone Piñon has reestablished musical connections to the styles that have historically been the wellsprings of the New Mexican sound: regional son from Mexico, Indigenous violin music of the Southwest and Mexico, Anglo-American fiddling from the Midwest, traditional Spanish music, and Western Swing from Texas and Oklahoma.  The result is a new birth for an old sound--a sound that is rooted in place and tradition but fully awake to the modern musicianship that the members of the trio bring it.

In early 2015 the band's development inspired fiddler Jordan Wax to travel to Mexico's Huasteca, a region historically connected musically to Santa Fe by the Camino Real, for a 6-month immersion in indigenous ceremonial and Huapango dance music.  Since the band has been back together they have been playing extensively in Northern New Mexico and across the US and were asked to represent the region at the¡Globalquerque! Festival of World Music and Culture. 

In February of 2016 Lone Pinon released their first album, "Trio Nuevomexicano"  recorded live at Frogville Studios in Santa Fe, NM.