RIGHT: Laurence Gonzales and his daughter, Leticia Gonzales, dance on the Plaza to the sounds of Lone Piñon on Wednesday.
Organizers to showcase variety of genres in free Plaza performances
As a kid, Noah Martinez would get embarrassed when his parents made him to listen to the music of famed Mexican singer Vicente Fernández at the family home in Los Ranchos de Albuquerque.
“I grew up listening to rancheras, and my friends kinda just made fun of me,” said Martinez, 27.
But now, as a musician playing the upright bass in the Santa Fe-based trio Lone Piñon, he interprets the same regional Mexican music with pride. He also plays the guitarrón, a deep-bodied six-string acoustic bass used by mariachis.
Martinez said that while he was growing up, he thought the ranchera music was too old-fashioned. He couldn’t relate to it. But after he experienced different phases in his life, he began to relate to the music he once scorned. “Once you get your heart broken,” he said, “you start to understand those old tunes.”
His friends may still laugh at rancheras, Martinez added, “but that’s OK.”
Lone Piñon, which on Wednesday opened the 15th annual Santa Fe Bandstand summer music series on the Plaza, is part of a growing trend among young Hispanic and Latino musicians who have turned to their parents’ era to find inspiration for their own music making and songwriting. Rancheras, corridos and other Latin American rhythms have seeped into contemporary songs, highlighting the multicultural experiences of Hispanic and Latino people living in the U.S.
“That’s epitomized by groups like Lone Piñon,” said Michael Dellheim, executive director of Outside In, which produces the Santa Fe Bandstand series.
“In a way, it’s happening now with norteño and Hispanic music in general,” he said. “You have a younger generation taking their parents’ music and interpreting it in their own way, and the younger audience thinks it’s new.”
Martinez said, “I think part of that is because old traditional music is so real, so authentic, it really stands the test of time.”
Spanish-language music from various genres is increasingly becoming part of American culture.
Last month, for example, “Despacito” became the No. 1 single on Billboard magazine’s Hot 100, the first Spanishlanguage song to hit the top spot in more than 20 years.
“Macarena,” in 1996, was the last Spanish-language song to rank No. 1. For many, “Despacito,” by Puerto Rican artists Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, and remixed featuring Canadian singer Justin Bieber, is proof of the force of Spanish-language music in pop culture.
Wednesday’s opening show included a performance by Max Baca y Los Texamaniacs, a San Antonio, Texas-based band that plays Tejano conjunto music, incorporating rock and jazz elements. Tejano music was popularized by American singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, one of few singers whose Spanishlanguage songs have become part of the musical mainstream. The legacy of Selena, who was killed in 1995 by the president of her fan club, has been celebrated by Canadian rapper Drake and other well-known artists.
Other performers in the popular summer music series who have taken a similar approach as Lone Piñon — incorporating regional Mexican music into their work — include Carrie Rodriguez, who will perform July 18 on the Plaza. Rodriguez, 38, of Austin, Texas, has said in previous interviews that some of the music
in her latest album, Lola, was inspired by her late great-aunt Eva Garza, a celebrated ranchera singer from San Antonio.
Among her latest singles are “I Dreamed I was Lola Beltrán,” which pays homage in English and Spanish to the late Mexican ranchera singers Beltrán and Javier Solís, two musical pioneers who have received international acclaim.
While acts with Spanishlanguage songs aren’t new to the Santa Fe Bandstand, Dellheim said he wanted to incorporate in the series this year a wider variety of musical genres from around the world.
“In general, I’ve been responding to the whole political climate, about borders and walls,” he said, referring to President Donald Trump’s call for stricter enforcement of immigration policies and a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
“If you love music,” Dellheim said, “you can’t say that it came from just one place.”
While Martinez grew up listening to the type of music that Lone Piñon performs, his bandmates, Jordan Wax and Greg Glassman, traveled to southern Mexico to immerse themselves in the regional music.
Wax, 36, the band’s lead vocalist — who sings in Spanish and sometimes in the pre-Columbian dialect Nahuatl — said he grew up playing Jewish dance music on a violin in his home state of Missouri. As he continued to play traditional Jewish fiddle music, he said, he discovered a genre known as huapango fiddling from the Huasteca region of San Luis Potosí, Mexico.
In 2013, shortly after Lone Piñon was formed, Wax moved to southern Mexico to learn from huapango musicians. He was already fluent in Spanish, a language he learned after spending time as an exchange student in Ecuador. He’s not fluent in Nahuatl, he said, but he learned enough from his time in San Luis Potosí to sing in the indigenous language.
“That’s the biggest compliment you can pay someone, to learn their language, and I think that comes out musically, too,” he said.
Lone Piñon has received some negative feedback from Hispanics in New Mexico and from Mexican people because two of its three members are white, he said. But many other people praise the trio for continuing to spread a genre that for many years was only known in Huasteca.
Hundreds of music fans surrounded the Plaza stage Wednesday to hear Lone Piñon. As people started dancing, Clay Carsner, who was visiting from Austin, said he was impressed by the group and appreciated its falsetto sound. Even coming from a city known for music, he said, he rarely hears the style performed by Lone Piñon.
Lawrance Gonzales of Santa Fe, who danced with his daughter to a song, said he was familiar with the band. Growing up in Northern New Mexico, he said, he would listen to similar music. But as time went by, the popularity of traditional Northern New Mexico music declined.
“You know, it’s really something that it takes a couple Anglos to bring it back,” he said. “They’re interested much deeper than some native New Mexicans.”