Artist Category: Latin | Page 3

Praised by NPR’s Bob Boilen as a “powerful voice whose tender performance commands attention and fosters connection,” Alisa Amador made history in 2022 with the first-ever Spanish language song to win the prestigious Tiny Desk Contest.

Now, two years later, the bilingual singer/songwriter has formally introduced herself with her stunning full-length debut, Multitudes. Recorded with co-producers Tyler Chester and Daniel Radin, the album is a bold, captivating self-portrait, one that serves not only as a testament to how far Amador has come (she’s earned dates with everyone from Hozier and Brandi Carlile to Lake Street Dive and Maggie Rogers), but also as a celebration of where she comes from (her roots span Puerto Rico, New Mexico, Argentina, and New England). Slipping effortlessly between Spanish and English and featuring appearances from Gaby Moreno, Madison Cunningham, and Quinn Christopherson, the collection is raw and vulnerable, at once steeped in devastating loss and uncertainty, but also laced with the hope and resilience of a young woman learning to find her voice and stand her ground. Certainly, Multitudes is a beautiful record—the way Amador’s crystalline voice cuts through the album’s lush synthesizers, dreamy guitars, and cinematic string arrangements is nothing short of spellbinding—but more than that, it’s a fierce work of discovery and affirmation, a profound, revelatory meditation on triumph and loss, endings and beginnings, identity and belonging.

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.