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Film Synopsis: "And Those Who Dance it Surrender Their Hearts to Each Other is a portrait of Lone Piñon, a Northern New Mexican string band celebrating their region’s cultural roots. With fiddles, upright bass, accordions, vihuela, mandolin, guitars, jarana huasteca, and vocals in Spanish, English, Nahuatl and P’urepecha, they play a wide spectrum of the traditional music that is at home in New Mexico. The musicians have learned from elder musicians (such as Antonia Apodaca) who instilled in them a respect for continuity of the community based social and dance music. Noah Martinez, Jordan Wax, Leticia Gonzales and Greg Glassman have brought the language of New Mexico traditional music and related regional traditions back onto the modern stage, back onto dance floors, and back into the ears of a young generation." “The group played with great energy, authenticity, and devotion... a nice variety of old-time Mexican musical rhythms. I really dug right into the first cut (in the film)...”— Chris Strachwitz, founder of Arhoolie Records
Artist Bios: Cody Edison grew up in Idaho and he currently resides in Los Angeles, California. In 2012, he received his BFA in photography and media from CalArts. The discovery of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music became both a cultural gold mine and practical one. Edison co-produced Re-Envisioning America (2010-2012), a multi-media homage to the Anthology with colleagues at CalArts. These productions were widely hailed as among the most significant tributes to American music that the CalArts community had ever seen or heard. Following the sucesss of this project Edison became dedicated to filming performances of regional roots musicians who are renewing and preserving folk traditions in North America. And Those Who Dance it Surrender Their Hearts to Each Other (2018) received the Best Documentary Feature Award from the Cinema on the Bayou Film Festival in Louisiana. It has screened in Mexico, Canada and widely through out the United States. In 2021, the film was added to the permanent collections of the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico and the Library of Congress (American Folklife Center) in Washington, D.C.
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 for years 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 learned from Rolando "El Quecho" Hernández 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 (accordionist and guitarist of Rociada, NM). In 2018 he travelled to Morelia, Michoacán for a few weeks of intensive study with master son calentano violinist Serafin Ibarra Cortez and P’urepecha elder and composer Tata Pedro Dimas.
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.
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