Paul Anastasio & Tina Pilione channel the late Juan Reynoso and his music, Friday, December 8, at the Whirlybird
Paul Anastasio and Tina Pilione /DCross photos
By Dominick Cross
For a long brief time last century, I lived in Houston for nine months.
It was my second time stalled in the cemented monstrosity of cloverleaf and high-arching interstate highways, Texas-tall buildings, crawling strip malls, and, on every suburban corner, gas stations with parasitic fast-food nubs attached.
And not last nor least, there’s also the 3.5 million people spread thick everywhere by a giant rolling pin half the size of Florida’s panhandle.
Everything about big cities fence me in. Not a big fan. And that’s why God made AM radio and kept it alive today: Sanity. Now.
I can’t recall the call letters/numbers of the Houston radio stations I’d tuned into in the early 1990s, but I’d already learned that AM is a good way to get the hyper-local flavor of an area — like local/ethnic music and food — if you’re passing through. (Local radio stations in South Louisiana not included.)
Enter Mexican music on the radio. Houston, we don’t have a problem after all.
I’ve always been a fan of roots and rootsy music, or most any genre stripped down to its unplugged basics, so it was easy to get into Norteno, polka, Tejano, Banda, Mariachi and other styles.
But when I heard a fiddle crying, a guitar nodding in agreement while another gently kept pace, I was especially taken. I can’t say for sure it was Juan Reynoso I’d heard, but it was the Tierra Caliente style.
Still last century but a couple of years later, I’d described the Mexican music to Christine Balfa and Dirk Powell, of Cajun band Balfa Toujours.
They knew. In due time, they gave me a Juan Reynoso cassette
Fast-forward to today (early December 2023) and you’ll have Reynoso aficionados, Paul Anastasio and Tina Pilione, performing Tierra Calinte music, Friday, December 8, 2023, 7 p.m., at the still a funky, under-the-radar venue, The Whirlybird. Tix $10. Go HERE for more info.
Here’s a bio bit on Reynoso from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings: Juan Reynoso Portillo (1912–2007) was a self-taught folk violinist from the Tierra Caliente (Hot Land) region of Mexico. He made his first recordings in the 1940s, gradually gaining notice throughout Mexico. In the 1990s, his recordings began to appear in the United States, which eventually led to an appearance at the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in 1997. He continued to play at the festival for eight consecutive years.
Anastasio first heard Reynoso at a Fiddle Tunes workshop in 1996 where he himself taught fiddle.
“And it’s almost as if what Juan was playing was, like, the edges of a puzzle piece that fit into all those other styles. I don’t know how else to put it.”
Paul Anastasio
When Anastasio inquired about the music, he was told the same story Reynoso had heard himself at home: ‘It’s an old music that’s going out of style and not too many people play it.’
A mission was born at those words.
Anastasio was determined to help save the traditional music of the Tierra Caliente. And to do so, he immersed himself in the music, taking lessons from the master and his contemporaries.
“I went to the festival and then I stayed for a week after and I started setting up the lessons,” Anastasio said. A bilingual festival-goer handled those issues.
“He probably said something to Juan like, ‘This gringo doesn’t speak any Spanish. He really wants to learn. Can we do lessons?’”
A week of lessons would follow on Reynoso’s turf and Anastasio returned to the States. He then went back to Mexico for seven more weeks of lessons and another lengthier lesson session was forthcoming: three months.
“That’s the longest trip I ever did to take lessons,” Anastasio said.
It was more than worth it. Something about Reynoso’s fiddle playing caught Anastasia’s ear and respect.
“Oh, my god. It’s so great,” said Anastasio. “It’s like it has some things in common with fiddle tunes, some things in common with old jazz—some syncopation and stuff like that. Like traditional jazz.
“It just kind of completed the picture for me,” he said. “It’s like, Oh, my God. All this stuff is put together into this regional style. I flipped.”
Anastasio said he “was into a whole bunch of different styles of music,” which would include bluegrass, old country music, Western Swing, swing and traditional jazz. Those styles can be heard on his resume that includes Asleep at the Wheel, Merle Haggard, Larry Gatlin, and Loretta Lynn.
“And it’s almost as if what Juan was playing was, like, the edges of a puzzle piece that fit into all those other styles,” he said. “I don’t know how else to put it.”
One may wonder if Anastasio has dropped all those other styles of music for Tierre Caliente sound.
“No, not really. This was another style that I was trying to get into my vocabulary,” said Anastasio. “In fact, I went and taught at a camp in the east and I was teaching alongside Buddy Spicher, the great country fiddler/Nashville sessions musician.
“He knew I was doing this Mexican music and he expressed a concern that everything that I play is going to be colored by that Mexican style.
“And I think he was relieved to find out I was still able to play swing, traditional jazz, Western swing as I played it before,” he said. “It’s just another tool in the tool box.”
These days and locally, Anastasio plays with Stop the Clock Cowboy Jazz band.
“But I kept playing all the other stuff as well. It just kind of took over some years of my life to study it, transcribe it and play it,” he said.
Not only did Anastasio learn the Hot Lands music, he also found out Reynoso had some other ideas of his own.
“One of the things I learned from Juan Reynoso was he’d always wanted to be able to play the music in his repertoire with a violin trio,” said Anastasio. “He told me, ‘I’d heard radio and TV orchestras playing three-part harmonies. I’ve always thought if they can do it, why couldn’t we do it with our music?’”
So when Anastasio brought other musicians to Mexico to study the music, they ended up figuring out second parts, the harmony parts.
“And then, as we got more people down there to study, we started doing everything for trio,” he said, adding that Reynoso would play his part and Anastasio would write it down, “best I could. At first, it was just by hand on music manuscript. And then as technology advanced, I was able to do it with the Finale.”
And one of those musicians was Tina Pilione.
Anastasio said when Pilione heard Reynoso’s the music, “she flipped out.” He gave her a recording of his lessons with Juan and other fiddlers he studied with, as well as commercial recordings. “She just liked it. She was attracted to it just as I was.”
Ecos de la Tierra Caliente
“I never did really intend to compose anything new at all,” said Anastasio. “But it just sort of happened.”
And once it did, with Anastasio on fiddle, Elena DeLisle on guitar, and Juan Manuel Barco on bajo sexto, the trio released “Ecos de la Tierra Caliente” (Echoes of the Hot Eartj) New Works in the Styles of Mexico’s Hot Lands in 2021.
Anastasio’s original tunes on the CD, recorded at Ed Littlefield Jr.’s Sage Arts Recording Studio an hour north of Seattle, Washington, came about nearly accidentally.
“When I was studying with Juan, I really didn’t mean to start composing new stuff, new works,” he said. “But I’d been practicing and I’d hear some little lick and I’d say, well, that doesn’t sound like anything that Juan played. Or anything any of the other violinists I studied with played.”
With that, Anastasio began to expand on the songs.
“So I flushed it out and before you know it, I had maybe 60 tunes,” said Anastasio. “When an idea came to me, it was like what Mexican genre is this closest to because Juan and those guys played about a dozen genres.”
They played 6/8 dance music, marches, minuets, waltzes, tangos, boleros, swing, fox trots and other styles.
“The fox trot was a big American influence deep down across the border,” Anastasio said.
Anastasio was going for “a distinctive Tierra Caliente flavor” he said. “That’s what I was trying to capture in the original pieces I wrote.”
To accompany, if not accomplish said “flavor,” Anastasio had in mind a certain way to record the session.
“I didn’t want us to record in separate rooms with headphones. I’d rather have it be more of a live feel, so we actually just sat around some microphones in one room with no headphones and played,” Anastasio said. “How do you play together if you’re in separate rooms?
“It’s a live music thing. That’s the deal. That’s how it’s performed, live. So I said let’s record live as if we were doing a performance, playing for a dance, whatever.”
The recording was done in a few days and when Anastasio worked on the mix, it was discovered that DeLise’s guitar needed a boost so they went “back in and remixed everything” to get it right.
Anastasio, who wrote the liner notes, again went back and recorded harmony parts for most to the recorded songs.
“Then I decided not to use it. I said we’re going to put it out with just a single violin part,” he said. “If you start doing something with three violins and harmony, that’s going to have a great big sound and then the next tune on the CD, it can’t help but sound thin after three violins.”
The songs on ‘Hot Lands’ were named after people Anastasio knows, including his wife, Claudia (“Flor de mi vida”), Reynoso, (“Juan el gauche”), other musicians and relatives.
“I was just trying to make it kind of personal,” said Anastasio.
While Barco plays bajo sexto on the recording, it’s generally not found where Anastasio found the music.
“The bajo sexto is almost never heard down in Tierre Caliente,” said Anastasio. “But I like the sound and I like the blend with the guitar. So I basically talked (Barco) into playing with me on the record.”
Both musicians on the recording have played some Mexican music with Anastasio at one time or another.
“And it seemed like a good little trio,” he said. “I’d known them before we went in the studio to do the recording. They’re just good strong players and they like the music. And they like the music.
“We went in and just cut it,” said Anastasio. “Cut it live.”
The CD project was funded by 4Culture, the Washington State Arts Commission. Ed Littlefield Jr. provided use of his Sage Arts Recording Studio with Erick Jaskowiak and Jordan Cunningham as recording engineers. Claudia Anastasio, CD graphics.