Lone Piñon: Getting to the heart of it

My work brings me in contact with a number of musicians who play traditional Mexican folk. Unlike pop music, which freely draws from anywhere it wants, I sometimes hear questions of authenticity with regards as who gets to play traditional Mexican music and under what conditions it is performed. There is a certain amount of wariness when it comes to perceived interlopers that borrow from traditional forms, but bend them to their own artistic purposes, something that creatively restless pop musicians often depend on for inspiration. Think Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon and David Byrne, to name three that I've always admired. Yet, I've even heard criticism of groups like East LA's Las Cafeteras, who mix up folk forms like son jarocho with indie pop songwriting, traces of hip-hop and a left leaning political platform. This, despite the fact that, as Chicanos, they would seem to have a legitimate claim on Mexican roots music.

And that brings me to this past Friday night and a show at Sabor a Café Steakhouse by Lone Piñon, a trio from Santa Fe, New Mexico that plays Mexican music in a stripped down, but ultimately complex manner: a trio of fiddle, guitar and guitarrón who perform totally acoustic, standing behind a single microphone through which all amplification passes, instruments and vocals alike, resulting in a startlingly organic sound that washes over you all at once without stereo separation.

Only Noah Martinez, the guitarrón player, hails from New Mexico, and his family roots go back all the way to colonial times. The other members of the trio, fiddler / lead vocalist Jordan Wax and guitarist Greg Glassman, come to Mexican folk from other fields. Wax, a Missouri native, studied Ozark mountain fiddling, has done time in a Klezmer punk band and, while living in Quito, Ecuador, played in a Latin Ska group. Guitarist Glassman, from New York City, studied with Gnawa musicians in Morocco, drummed for experimental jazz and Irish punk outfits, and even played rockabilly and gospel before traveling to Veracruz to study son jarocho.

They've been together as Lone Piñon for only a few years, but if I had to judge from what I heard Friday night absent any other information, I'd swear they've been doing this their whole lives. They concentrate on music from Mexico's Huasteca and Tierra Caliente regions, plus the area known as El Rio Grande del Norte: Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado. There are occasional forays into West Texas swing, son jarocho, corrido and even ranchera. Huapangos are the attention getters, but there are waltzes and polkas sprinkled through and even the occasional tender ballad. After a while, you start to hear the sound behind the sound, as intimations of the music's European and American folk influences simmer just below the surface. At times, it even feels a bit like gypsy jazz a la Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grapelli.



Ultimately, you sense the band's deep respect for the music and cultures from which it emerged, honoring its integrity with the purity of their all acoustic instrumental approach. There is no updating going on, but there is a subtle blending, like a good spice mix, as they bring their diverse backgrounds to this music. New Mexico itself, you might remember, was Mexico (along with Arizona, Texas Nevada and California) until what is called on this side of the border the Mexican-American War of 1846-47, which resulted in massive U.S. expansion. It has the highest percentage of both Hispanic and Indigenous populations of any contiguous U.S. state. But it's also close to the Midwest and it of course borders Texas and Oklahoma. All of this is present in New Mexico, and it is present in the music of Lone Piñon as well.

But enough of academics! Lone Piñon are, first and foremost, crack musicians and singers, but the casualness of their presentation belies this expertise, instead conjuring the feel of a gathering of good friends. Jordan Wax kills on Huapango style vocals, and when Glassman joins in on harmonies, the effect is magic, made all the more so by their unique one microphone presentation. The interplay between fiddle and guitar, anchored by Martinez's flawless bottom on the guitarrón, will make your jaw drop, then pull it back up into a wide grin.

Lone Piñon's recorded live in the studio album Trio Nuevomexicano was just released, and I'm kicking myself that I spent all my money on cerveza on Friday, leaving nothing for the CD. But you can download it from Amazon or stream it on Spotify, and it does a pretty darn good job of capturing who they are. Nothing beats a live show, though, so check their website to find out when they're coming to a city or folk festival near you.

You wont regret it.

What goes around...

I recently wrote a brief preview article for Arte y Vida Chicago of an upcoming concert by Novalima, a band that I'm familiar with and like quite a bit. As I put it together, I had a whole bunch of thoughts that there wasn't room for, prompted by my musings on travel and the two-way nature of global exchange.  I've got room here, though....

In the age of sampling, with hip hop's aesthetic of combining disparate elements to fresh and new effect, global dance music has flourished. The Washington D.C. based DJ duo of Rob Garza and Eric Hilton have been doing it for almost two decades as Thievery Corporation, a name I always took as a sly reference to the liberal borrowing of sampled exotica that they layered into their early recorded projects. I'm not sure if they were the first to do so, but like most that were good at it, the studio sampling was soon supplemented by live musicians who could take their multi-kulti kaleidoscopic sound to the stage.

Soon, there were other examples of this new sound emerging out of the dance clubs, like the Paris-based Gotan Project's take on tango. DJs around the world were introducing ethnic sounds into club sets or, just as often, injecting electronic beats into local traditions, packing dance floors in São Paulo, Beirut, Mumbai... pretty much everywhere.

Novalima

In the midst of this freewheeling global exchange stepped four kids from Lima, Peru who dug rock, pop, salsa, reggae, dance and electronic music.  One stayed in Lima, but the others headed off to make music in London, Barcelona and Hong Kong. They stayed in touch, though, e-mailing song ideas back and forth in a long distance collaboration that became Novalima. And what they settled on for a creative anchor was music from home, Afro-Peruvian traditions dating back centuries. Returning to Lima, the core members sought out the best traditional musicians to give organic life to their vision, forming a powerful live band that now takes Afro-Peruvian music to the world stage in a form that is irresistible to club kids and musicologists alike.

Musical blending is probably as old as music itself, and there are dozens of current examples of artists creating out of their own traditions and pumping up the volume with electronics, hip-hop, funk and rock. Novalima has been doing it since 2001, and I find something charming and perhaps even reassuring in their back story, that you can travel the globe making discoveries and yet find your muse is something that was back home all along. It's about holding on to your cultural identity even as you participate as a citizen of the world. Still, you return changed by those journeys, and out of that comes something new.

Novalima is, in a sense, kind of a mirror image to Thievery Corporation, who cast about for global sounds to spice up their dance floor mix. Novalima brought dance beats (and a lot more) back home and integrated them into their own traditions, creating a sound that is culturally authentic and at the same time thoroughly up-to-the minute. You might want to check it out for yourself.

Colombia Three Ways

Nope, it's not the lastest chef creation from Las Tablas Colombian Steakhouse.

It's three bands back to back at the Celebrate Clark Street Festival on Saturday. One stuck to tradition, while another applied psych-rock riffs and traced cumbia's migrations to other parts of Latin America. A third incorporated ska and delivered power to the people anthems worthy of the Clash. All three made for an exhilarating (and exhausting) two and a half hours of dancing in the streets.

Dos Santos Antibeat Orquesta - Cumbia may have originated in Colombia, but like reggae it has spread throughout Latin America. As things do when they arrive in new regions, the original chemistry is altered in accordance with local customs. When cumbia arrived in Peru in the 1960s, it was adapted by local musicians and renamed chicha, after the mind-altering corn liquor favored by indigenous locals. At once traditional and modern, it became a psychedelic sound when surf guitars, wah-wah pedals, farfisa organ and other western rock elements were added (not to mention that corn liquor). Dos Santos specializes in this with both original songs and vintage covers. They also explore what happened to cumbia in Panama and other destinations, and I love that their full name is a sly tip of the sombrero to Fela Kuti's African rebel music.  I'm told that the band has only been together a couple of months, but they were remarkably tight, and I'm very eager to hear what they do as they write more songs.

Los Vicios de Papá - These guys are local favorites of mine. Their brand of cumbia is heavily flavored by Jamaican ska filtered through 1970's England and the greatest punk band of all time, the Clash. At least that's the way I hear it. Ska was introduced to England by Caribbean immigrants, and it's sound was adopted by what were known as 'two-tone' bands because they very deliberately included both blacks and whites in their membership when racism and nationalism were flourishing under Margaret Thatcher. No band better represented this anti-racist, anti-colonialist stance than the Clash, who soon turned their insightful gaze on the rest of the world, including the U.S. interventions in Southeast Asia and Latin America, adding a world of rhythms to the original rock and ska. Los Vicios is the sound of Latin America reflected back, and between the irresistible dance rhythms and shouted choruses of "lucha y libertad!" and "pueblo resiste!", it's party music of the highest order. 

Beto Jamaica Rey Vallenato - And finally, the traditionalist, albeit one with an extremely funky electric bass. Beto is an absolute master of button accordion. I think he's right up there with Tex-Mex wizards like Flaco Jimenez and Esteban Jordan. The stuff he was doing, cranking out two or three melodies at once like an accomplished jazz pianist, was mind boggling. Vallenato, for lack of a better term, is country music from Colombia's interior ranching area, and Beto calling himself "Rey", or King of this sound, isn't much of a stretch. In addition to that funky bass player, his band is mostly made up of traditional percussion that churns along at almost superhuman speed. Hearing them after bands with their modern take on tradition was revelatory, and the number of dancers per square foot (and the waving of Colombian flags) certainly attested to the deep appreciation the crowd felt for this taste of home.

And, hey, that's only day one of the festival.

Homegrown.

I was first inspired to start this blog when thinking about the American Sabor exhibit that I mentioned in my introductory post. I was thinking "How cool is it that all this Latino music that we think of as foreign comes from right here is the USA?"  In many cases, even the musicians themselves were born here, not, well, there. They are the children of immigrants, living out their version of the American Dream.

I proposed a regular column to one of the folks that is kind enough to publish my musings, discussing the music released by these US / Latin hybrids, but there really wasn't room for it at the time. So, I filed the idea and let it gestate over the winter.

I've since decided that, A.) I would start a blog, and B.) it would address more than just music and certainly more then Latino music. But.. to honor that original intent, can I just say the Los Lobos is one of the greatest rock bands of all time? And that this fact (that's right, I'm not calling it an opinion) is wholly attributable to the way they have stayed true to a vision of their own roots music (Mexican folkloric, American R&B) while constantly expanding outward to encompass just about every imaginable style?

Like many a punk rocker in the early 80's, I discovered Los Lobos when their first widely distributed EP " ...And a Time to Dance" came out on Slash, a label that was home several L.A. punk bands like X, the Germs, Fear, and the Blasters. To my ears, its songs were an unconnected mix of blues, early rock n' roll (they covered Richie Valens' Come on Let's Go here way before La Bamba propelled them to fame in 1987) and Mexican folk music, which I knew little about. But I loved it. If fact, I got impatient when their first full album, How Will the Wolf Survive, came out, wanting more Mexican and less rock, thinking, under my highly misguided idea of what was authentic, that's what they were supposed to do

What I didn't know at the time was that Mexican East L.A. supported a thriving Chicano rock scene that loved R&B. Mexican music was what their parents listened to. Los Lobos, L.A. born rockers all, were one of the first bands to rediscover the value of the old stuff, playing it alongside the R&B and rock that they'd been cranking out since they first picked up guitars. Their genius lies in their understanding that American R&B is every bit authentically theirs as the rancheras, corridos and norteñas that they lovingly played on their 1988 release La Pistola y El Corazón.  As creative and adventurous musicians, they grew by leaps and bounds, taking in virtually every influence they could get their hands on, because all of that belongs to them too. By the time they released their 1992 masterpiece, Kiko, their songs were a seamless blend of all these influences. Yet, in terms of identity, they've remained fundamentally the same band that released Just Another Band from East L.A.in 1978.

The indispensable box set (get the CD if you can - it's lavishly packaged and crammed with insightful commentary) El Cancionero Mas y Mas documents an incredible 25 or so years of growth, including live recordings and side projects like Los Super Seven and Latin Playboys.  I'm especially fond of the Latin Playboys tracks, avant garde soundscapes that evoke a stroll through the barrio, but all the previously unreleased live stuff acknowledges and pays tribute to a world of influences.

After over 30 years as a band, they still tour incessantly, playing everything from state fairs to prestigious concert halls and, if you're lucky, the occasional club gig. Catch 'em if you can.