Lone Piñon Band Members
JORDAN WAX
(violin, piano- and three-row accordions, mandolin, guitar, vocals) grew up in Missouri and was traditionally trained by master Ozark fiddler Fred Stoneking and Central Missouri dance fiddler John White. He worked as bandleader and accordionist for a Yiddish dance band before his work with Missouri and New Mexican fiddle styles inspired him to travel to Mexico for a 6-month immersion in Mexican huapango fiddling, where he studied with Rolando "El Quecho" Hernandez of Trio Chicontepec, Casimiro Granillo of Trio Chicamole, and a variety of local fiddlers in the Huasteca region of San Luis Potosí. His studies of traditional New Mexico dance music have been guided and inspired in the past years by Tomas Maes (mandolinist of Santa Fe, NM) and Antonia Apodaca (late accordionist and guitarist of Rociada, NM). In 2018 he travelled to Morelia, Michoacan for a few weeks of intensive study with master son calentano violinist Serafin Ibarra Cortez and P'urepecha elder and composer Tata Pedro Dimas. He serves the Manitos Community Memory Project as a Community Archivist digitizing and archiving New Mexico music-related documents, sound recordings, and oral histories.
TANYA NUÑEZ
(upright bass, guitar, vocals) was born in southern New Mexico. Growing up in a musical family, no celebration was complete without music and dance: rancheras, polkas, valses and cumbias. She has worked as a bassist in a variety of traditions from classical, tango, Persian and Arabic, to country, rock and funk/soul. Though she plays many styles, the beautiful and diverse music of the Southwest US and Mexico holds a special place in her heart and she is honored to study and share it.
KARINA WILSON
(violin, viola, vocals) grew up in Glorieta, New Mexico, where she was surrounded from an early age with traditional music and dance. In addition to professionally performing and teaching classical violin and viola, her passion for traditional dance music and the roles it plays in cultural context has taken her to 23 countries/territories to work with musicians from Alaska to the Ukraine and Iceland to Guinea. She is in high demand at dances and workshops across the US and at home teaches and performs honky-tonk, old-time, classical, international folk, and regional Mexican and New Mexican traditions.
SANTIAGO ROMERO
(guitar, vihuela, vocals) grew up in the village of Agua Fria, New Mexico, on land where his family has lived for many generations. He began learning the guitar at the age of 6 from older musicians in his community and began working as a mariachi in Las Cruces, El Paso, and Ciudad Juárez in his early twenties. He has performed and served as creative director in a variety of ensembles, taught as part of several educational initiatives and in 2005 was appointed by Governor Bill Richardson as the first New Mexico state representative of Mariachi music. In addition to his work with Lone Piñon he has served for 13 years as the director of Mariachi Sonidos del Monte, one of New Mexico’s premiere Mariachi ensembles.
