The Cedar and KFAI Present
LONE PIÑON with Steam Machine
Saturday, September 16, 2023 / Doors: 7:00 PM / Show: 8:00 PM
All Ages
Standing
$17 Advance, $22 Day of Show
This is a standing show with an open floor. To request seating or other access accommodations, please go to our Access Page.
General Admission tickets are available online.
ABOUT THIS SHOW
An old-time West Bank dance with an orquesta típica, Lone Piñon!
A New Mexican string band 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 and along the border.
"They make the music of the border into something living, breathing and absolutely enticing." - fROOTS Magazine
LONE PIÑON
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.
The Norte has long been a crossroads of cultures, and centuries of intersecting histories, trade routes, migrations, and cultural movements have endowed the region with an expansive and rich musical heritage that weaves together Spanish, Mexican, Indigenous, European immigrant, Anglo-American, and Afro-American musical influences. The oldest strands of this tradition have survived in continuity, renewed by each new generation’s contribution to core style and repertoire that has been passed from musician to musician, in some cases over many centuries. Though rapid cultural change since the ‘50s has led to these sounds becoming scarce in their home territory, they never fully disappeared--thanks to the elders and past generations that lovingly and tenaciously carried them forward, renewing the voice of their musical ancestors at each step into changing circumstances.
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.
The musical landscape of Northern New Mexico bears the record of interconnecting musical movements that cross state, national, generational, and ethnic borders. Lone Piñon’s active and recorded repertoire reflects that complexity, and has included a wide range of regionally-relevant material (Western swing, conjunto, New Mexican Spanish and Mexican ranchera, Central Mexican son regional, country, onda chicana, etc.) around the core New Mexican violin and accordion-driven polkas, cunas, inditas, valses, and chotes learned from elders.
To learn more about Lone Piñon:
"La Julia" by Lone Piñon. Video courtesy of Lone Piñon's Official YouTube Channel.
STEAM MACHINE
Steam Machine is an old time bluegrass project fronted by award-winning Minneapolis fiddler AJ Srubas and Twin Cities old time music & dance instigator Rina Rossi on guitar. Two time Appalachian String Band Music Festival Traditional Band Contest ribbon winners and Folk Alliance Midwest Official Showcase Artists, this 'Twin Cities supergroup' brought to the national stage a midwest influenced string band aesthetic that didn't draw such hard lines between bluegrass and old time music. Since 2018 they have kept busy touring the midwest and country, performing at venues ranging from concert stages to festivals to dance halls. At home in Minneapolis, they are heavily involved as organizers in many of the local community old time and bluegrass institutions. While not purists, they do listen closely to the “old stuff” and strive to capture the essence of what makes these tunes and songs special, as they hear it.
To learn more about Steam Machine:
