The Pearl in Locke is an intimate listening room located in the 1916 Chinese boarding house & pool hall. ~~ 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 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. Founded in 2014, Lone Piñon was created 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 relationships 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 contemporary 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, including a wide range of regionally relevant material — Western swing, conjunto, New Mexican Spanish and Mexican ranchera, Central Mexican son regional, country, onda chicana, and more — built around the core New Mexican violin- and accordion-driven polkas, cunas, inditas, valses, and chotes learned from elders.
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Please carpool if possible — the town of Locke has limited parking. Locke is 28 miles south of midtown Sacramento. Plan on about a 45-minute drive if you take the scenic River Road (recommended) or 30 minutes if you take I-5 to Twin Cities Road. If you're coming from the Bay Area, Locke is about 80 minutes from the Bay Bridge. Call 916-442-0212 with any questions.
