What a melting pot of music this Americana thing is – and here’s an opportunity for us to further expand our horizons as we look towards Northern New Mexico and the band Lone Piñon. This song – which we’d hazard a tentative translation as The Tecolote – is a dance tune fro that region. The Tecolote melody is played in 6/8, a meter that resembles an Irish jig and it comes from a large repertoire of tunes in this rhythm that older dance fiddlers in Northern New Mexico used to play, referred to sometimes as quadrillas or cutilios.
Lone Piñon are Jordan Wax, Karina Wilson, Tanya Nuñez, and Santiago Romereo, and they can be seen above in that order from left to right. They play the music of their region, their folk music – a celebration of the integrity and diversity of their region’s cultural roots – and they play it with fiddles, upright bass, guitars, accordions, vihuela, and bilingual vocals. Of today’s song they say: “El Tecolotito showcases an acoustic sound that is very distinctive of New Mexico and that is quite unlike folk music from anywhere else in the world. We learned the song from elder mentors, who learned it from the generation before them. The distinctive guitar rhythm was taught to Santiago by Tanya’s cousin Sal García–Sal is an elder musician who has played all around the world in a variety of cosmopolitan styles, but once when he was hanging out with us for a rehearsal he remembered a very old style that his father used to play at local dances in Central New Mexico–Santiago picked it right up and it became the backbone for our version of this song. It’s a very old-fashioned genre of music in New Mexico that you hardly ever hear anymore, so it’s particularly meaningful to be releasing a brand-new, contemporary recording that shows all the life and potential that is still in the tradition today.”
El Tecolote is taken from the upcoming album Hot Carne Seca, out on May 29 on Jalopy Records.
One other snippet we’d like to add here – the band also mentioned that they learned this version of El Tecolote “from Ken Keppeler and Jeanie McLerie, who learned it playing with Cleofes Ortiz of Bernal, New Mexico before our time. We include it on the album in their memory.”
Of course, Ken Keppeler and Jeanie McLerie were Bayou Seco, who a few years back would regularly tour the UK in the Summer. Whilst completing this feature, this writer became aware that Ken died last year, and Jeanie in 2024 – readers with very long memories may recall a long ago review of The Rhythms Of The World festival at which Bayou Seco had appeared: they were great fun, really enthusiastic and keen to talk music. Ken’s fretless banjo was a joy to hear and difficult to attempt to play, but he was gracious enough to be encouraging (although I never did get myself a fretless banjo!). It’s sad to discover that they’re both gone, but it’s a wonderful thing that they passed on the music they gathered to another generation.
