Jordan Wax
on assimilation, outsidership, and voice
“I often describe the environment I was raised in as a post-assimilation cultural environment. There was a lot of cultural diversity in Missouri, but it was not something that was outwardly celebrated or really expressed.”
In my conversation with musician Jordan Wax, we talk a lot about the concept of outsidership – what it means to belong, who has ownership of cultural traits, how to find voice within a tradition. Growing up in mid-Missouri, Jordan says he often felt out of place.
“That was always clear to me, coming from a mixed background, and visiting my grandparents in a rural farming community. There was a part of me that did not feel recognized, and at that time, there was really an insider culture. It was easy to tell if someone's not an insider, either ethnically or culturally.”
Jordan is most-well known for his work with traditional New Mexican band, Lone Piñon. Prior to that, he spent his teens and twenties learning Yiddish, playing klezmer music, and studying traditional Missouri fiddle music with Fred Stoneking and John White. It makes sense that as a musician, Jordan has found his voice and place in his communities – both adopted and those he was born into – by pushing into these ideas of acculturation and questioning who and what gets valued in a community.
“I think of assimilation as a process of erasing or conforming all of the outward parts of a culture so that we can fit in or get by. In the big picture, those superficial elements we can change or hide are a very small portion of what makes us up as cultural beings. If you cross a culturally assimilated person in the street or stand behind them in line at the supermarket, there's 99% of their culture that is not apparent. I think hearing these different musical languages gave voice to this 99% of culture that was unconscious, unexpressed, or not openly part of our community.”
Klezmer Beginnings
As a kid, Jordan says he felt like a blank slate when it came to music. He recalls sitting in his parent’s driveway and making laser beam sounds on a keyboard, borrowing his brother’s guitar, and building homemade instruments out of rubber bands. “I didn't receive any technical training or anything, but at least in my trajectory, excitement and discovery has by far outweighed the training that I would've gotten otherwise.”
Jordan became interested in klezmer as a teenager after stumbling across Yiddish books at the library. He acquired some klezmer CDs from the local record store, took a few piano accordion lessons, and eventually started a klezmer band with his friends, performing at community gatherings and events around town. Jordan, who grew up in a secular household, says his parents were a bit baffled by this interest in Jewish music.
“I was fascinated by it, but I think for people who've been through that process of constantly being told that it's dangerous or distasteful for you to show these traits, it is uncomfortable when somebody is outing that culture.
I think that’s part of that deeper assimilation to the idea that we shouldn’t outwardly display our culture; it’s a private thing, or something better left as a passive trait.”
Jordan’s interest in klezmer music continued, and after high school, he attended an international klezmer gathering in Canada, where he was exposed to teachings from elder musicians and dancers.
“That experience gave light to the complexity of an oral tradition: how difficult it is to discover and how inaccurate it is to distill that into the way we often think of music, especially in classical or commercial music. The oral tradition had complexity and layers of it in terms of the phrasing and the different pitches and systems. There was a lot more there, and that helped me realize how important that was to preserve.”
Studying with Missouri Fiddlers
After the klezmer gathering, Jordan spent a year as an exchange student in Ecuador, where he saw the influences of globalization on a regional, non-capitalist culture. “When I came back to Missouri, I was like, ‘Look at all this beautiful culture that I never really noticed before.’ I wanted to become engaged with those things, not even necessarily in a musical way, but it just so happened to turn out like that.”
Upon his return to Missouri and with a growing interest in connecting with elders, Jordan reached out to study traditional fiddle with musician Fred Stoneking, who he describes as an “Ozarks fiddler with a mid-Missouri twist.”
“He was of this generation that was the perfect fusion of bluegrass and regional fiddling, where it had a Missouri groove and style, but he was able to incorporate a lot of ideas from bluegrass.”
Jordan spent six years studying with Fred, and for the first four years, he would drive to his home in Springfield, Missouri every week.
“He would show me tunes phrase by phrase until I could struggle my way through a tune. Then he would show me the guitar backup for it, and Fred was one of the best Missouri-style guitar players of his generation. I’d have recordings to go home with, and I would go back and be like, ‘Oh, he showed it to me this way, but he played it with this variation,’ or I would listen to the guitar licks and try to emulate that on my own.”
Jordan also studied with mid-Missouri fiddler, John White, under the Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program, sponsored by the Missouri Folk Arts Program. Whereas Stoneking was heavily steeped in the fiddle contest scene, John was more interested in the participatory aspect of the music, which included jams and dances.
“John also played a much older style. He would attend the contest scene and appreciate it, but he thought of it as fancy fiddling. He respected it, but wasn’t interested in doing it himself. He really stuck to his family style and that tradition around the dance culture. As much as Fred was about constant innovation, John was more about constant tradition.”
Jordan Wax and John White playing for the Hallsville, Mo. square dance. Photo by Deborah Bailey.
Jordan saw value in both approaches. He identified musically with Fred’s approach and loved being a part of John’s community and universe. That said, the tradition still felt somewhat foreign.
“It was a little bit of a stretch culturally to fit the tradition to my life and experience. Maybe that bridge would have slowly been crossed if I had been able to make it work in Missouri, as far as figuring out how to relate to it in a more personal way. One of the greatest parts about working with these teachers is they've all said, ‘I want you to learn everything I know, and do it better than I could ever do it.’ And I love that, but then it leaves me with the question, ‘How on earth are you going to be a better square dance fiddler in the year 2021?’ They'd describe the conditions and lifestyle that allowed the tradition to thrive in the past… stories of riding a horse to the dances and playing all night, and then riding the horse home at dawn and having to plow the next day, sleeping while they're on the plow. It just sounds like a different universe.”
New Mexico and Lone Piñon
After touring with his cousin’s rock band, Jordan spent his mid-20’s working on farms in Missouri and Arkansas. Struggling to find a way to make music a part of his life, Jordan took a job as a cook at a retreat center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It didn’t take him long until he became curious about the music being played locally and met his eventual bandmates of Lone Piñon, Noah Martinez and Greg Glassman.
In 2014, Lone Piñon formed as a trio with fiddle, guitar, and guitarrón, and began playing a mix of old country songs, Missouri fiddle tunes, New Mexican fiddle music, and songs from the ranchera repertoire. Since then, Lone Piñon has studied and performed Northern New Mexican and Mexican musical styles, connected with and learned from elders, recorded oral histories, performed at the Library of Congress, earned an American Folklife Center fellowship to study Northern New Mexican field recordings, and has welcomed a new roster of band members. Jordan says connections between New Mexican and Mexican musical styles quickly revealed themselves.
“The fiddle music is not isolated, and it’s really connected to the song culture, which is also less specialized and flows freely between different regions. So by studying New Mexican styles, we soon got exposed to these Northern and Central Mexican styles. Early on, I also had the chance to go to Mexico for six months, and I was able to learn huapango fiddling and work with Mexican fiddlers while I was there.”
Don Pedro Dimas of Ichupio, Michoacan, plays "Adios California" with his orquesta de cuerdas "Mirando al Lago" (Fidel, Miguel, and Hermenegildo). Morelia, Michoacan, December 2017.
When it comes to describing the variety of New Mexican musical styles, Jordan says the music is rooted in Hispanic culture because that was historically the dominant colonial force, but it was influenced by many other traditions.”
“I’m careful when I say that because I don't want to dispossess it from the Hispanic community. It definitely belongs to the Hispanic community in a really important way, but musically, it has the fingerprints and footprints all over it of this cross-cultural collaboration. There’s influences from the border area of Mexico, there's Northern style fiddling, there's swing tunes, stuff from Montana, Scandinavia, Italy. There’s musical and cultural influence from genízaros, communities of native peoples who were enslaved and raised as part of the Hispanic society, but who still maintained an indigenous identity. So, it’s incredibly diverse. This also helped me realize that there's always been that outer perimeter of culture where those kinds of collaborations happened and where cultures met each other.”
Lone Piñon plays a waltz from "Los Paisanos de Santa Fe", a santafesino stringband that played up until the 1980s.
Jordan says most of the elder musicians he’s learned from all have something in common: they’ve occupied that outer layer where exchange is welcomed.
“And I have realized, ‘Oh, so do I.’ Those external layers reflect more of that interaction between cultures, and then there are the more inner rings where stuff is held closer to the heart, is more consistent, less mixed, and can be more conservative at times. There are all of these variations in each culture and style, and my place, especially in New Mexico, is in this liminal area.
It also shows that it takes a whole community of people to be involved, that each person is going to find their own place that makes sense to them, and everyone has something to contribute. Anybody who plays enough to find their own voice or that certain something that is meaningful and authentic to them is going to be saying something about where they are in this puzzle.”
Post-Pandemic Dreams in New Mexico
Citing the impact of the work of John White on the dance and music communities in Missouri, Jordan says he and other community members are trying to get funding to start a program in Albuquerque where the public can engage with New Mexican dance and music workshops, as well as engage with elders. “Something I've learned is that it takes more constant, conscious focus for this kind of work. You can create a place for these traditions on the stage and still not inspire anything in the community.”
Compared to his experiences in Missouri, Jordan says he has noticed people in New Mexico generally have a much more positive view of their traditional music.
“I met so much resistance when I would publicly share traditional, regional Missouri culture. People would often mock it or maybe have a neutral response, which I think speaks to the different histories that generate shame around culture. I'm not saying one culture values it more because they appreciate it more--I think it’s more the mark of different histories, different forms and chapters of cultural colonialism, that have created those different conditions. That was a challenge in Missouri.
In the general community of people who were not in that subcult of musicians, there wasn't a lot of support, and I think my outsidership as a Jewish person in Missouri felt greater than my outsidership as an Easterner in New Mexico. At least at this period in time, I feel I'm able to move in this society a little bit. I’m grateful for the part of that that comes from authentic, horizontal cultural connection, and I’m wary of the part that comes from the different levels of hierarchy: It’s a settler-colonial system here, and as someone who comes in from the outside, you have a degree of privilege that supports that freedom.”
Jordan does not take that privilege lightly. “Historically, certain styles have been seen as intelligent and others are seen as less-than. You can just follow the lines of the history of colonialism and see why that is, but those elements of colonialism and nationalism are something that I want to really work against, and I feel comfortable in these styles of music because it gives me a way to do that.”
Klezmer Music Continues
While immersed in Lone Piñon, Jordan has continued to play klezmer music on the side. He says he’s struggled to find a marketable audience for it, but Jordan is quick to point out there is great value in being engaged with klezmer. He brings up a conversation he had with bassist Mark Rubin, who told him how important it was to be equally involved in your own traditions if you're going to be involved in others’.
“The more I’ve been involved in the music of my own ancestry, the more I can respect the complexities that people experience within New Mexican music. I think it helps as an outsider in a music tradition to be as involved as you can in your own family history to get used to those degrees of complexity and trauma and not just be totally ignorant or blindsided when they do come up.”
Dobriden #1 from Beregovski's "Jewish Instrumental Folk Music", collected in 1930 from a singer named Gurevich in Odessa, Ukraine. Original English lyrics by Jordan Wax.
Shortly before the pandemic, Jordan started playing with klezmer clarinetist and founding member of the Klezmatics, Margot Leverett, after she moved to Albuquerque. With touring and performing on hold, Jordan gained a fresh perspective.
“The pandemic gave me a chance to just explore the music that feels really alive, regardless of how well I can or can’t make a living with it. And I've thought a lot about this idea: as you concertize the music, you're commercializing it, you're making it more into a commodity and less into just a natural behavior of the community. So, it helps to really prioritize the non-professional musical spaces in my life – playing mandolin with my friend Tomas or singing Jewish songs at Shabbos with family.”
Lone Pinon’s music can be purchased at lone-piñon.bandcamp.com. Header photo by Wendy Johnson.
