Lara Manzanares is an award-winning bilingual singer-songwriter from Northern New Mexico. She grew up listening to her great-grandfather Eleuterio Martinez play traditional piano folk tunes, learning bluegrass guitar from cowboy musician J.K. Brown, and singing Mexican corridos with her grandparents. She honed her bilingual performance skills early on, performing with Nuevomexicano musicians Glen Martinez of Dixon, Frank Quintana of Santa Fe, and renowned traditional musician Cipriano Vigil of Chamisal, NM. Lara still sings the traditional music of her childhood, and also composes her own style of music in both English and Spanish. Her original work has won multiple awards and garnered consecutive invitations to perform at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. She continues her practice of playing with and learning from local traditional musicians in her collaborations with Jordan Wax, Tanya Nuñez, and many others working to honor, reinvigorate, and reimagine historical New Mexican tunes for a modern-day audience. When she’s not singing or helping on the ranch, you can find Lara on her Rio Grande loom, weaving tapestries with yarn from her family’s Navajo-Churro sheep. Jordan Wax grew up in Missouri and was traditionally trained by master Ozark fiddlers Fred Stoneking and Central Missouri dance fiddler John White. He worked as bandleader and accordionist for a Yiddish dance band 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 studied with Rolando "El Quecho" Hernandez of Trio Chicontepec, Casimiro Granillo of Trio Chicamole, and several other 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 Lara Manzanares Performance - July 9, 2026 (mandolinist of Santa Fe, NM) and Antonia Apodaca (late accordionist and guitarist of Rociada, NM). In 2018 he travelled to Morelia, Michoacan for a few weeks of intensive study with master son calentano violinist Serafin Ibarra Cortez and P'urepecha elder and composer Tata Pedro Dimas. He serves the Manitos Community Memory Project as a Community Archivist digitizing and archiving New Mexico music-related documents, sound recordings, and oral histories. Tanya Nuñez 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.
