Los Lobos with GA-20 at Jonathan Edwards Winery
Los Lobos with GA-20 at Jonathan Edwards Winery brings more than half a century of American roots music to North Stonington on Saturday, September 5. The outdoor vineyard concert pairs one of the most enduring bands to emerge from East Los Angeles with a younger group carrying the raw sound of electric blues into a new generation.
Gates open at 5:30 p.m., with music beginning at 7 p.m. Tickets are $80 plus fees, and the concert is for guests 21 and older.
For anyone who knows Los Lobos primarily from “La Bamba,” Saturday night is an opportunity to discover just how much music exists on either side of that enormous hit.
More Than 50 Years of Los Lobos
There aren’t many bands that can look back more than 50 years and still find most of the musicians who started the journey standing beside them onstage.
Los Lobos can.
David Hidalgo, Louie Pérez, Cesar Rosas and Conrad Lozano came together in East Los Angeles in 1973. Saxophonist and keyboardist Steve Berlin joined the group in the early 1980s, creating a lineup that has remained remarkably stable across the decades.
That longevity is even more impressive considering how unwilling Los Lobos has been to stay in one musical lane.
Rock and roll is there. So are blues, R&B, soul, country and traditional Mexican music. Accordion can sit beside electric guitar. A song rooted in Mexican folk tradition can give way to a hard-driving rocker.
The common thread is Los Angeles.
Los Lobos took the sounds surrounding them in East L.A., including Mexican and Mexican-American traditions and the American rock, blues and soul coming through the radio, and treated all of it as part of the same musical vocabulary.
How Will the Wolf Survive?
By the early 1980s, Los Lobos had spent years playing clubs, weddings and neighborhood gatherings before reaching a much larger audience.
Their 1984 album How Will the Wolf Survive? became the breakthrough.
The record helped establish Los Lobos nationally without sanding away the band’s cultural identity or the mixture of musical traditions that made it distinctive. Songs such as “Will the Wolf Survive?” and “Don’t Worry Baby” introduced listeners far beyond Southern California to a band that could move naturally between roots music and contemporary rock.
Then Hollywood called.
The Song That Changed Everything
In 1987, Los Lobos recorded “La Bamba” for the film about pioneering Chicano rock-and-roll star Ritchie Valens.
It exploded.
Their version reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, turning a band that had spent well over a decade building its audience into an international success.
For many musicians, a hit that large becomes the rest of the career.
Los Lobos went somewhere else.
Instead of trying to manufacture another “La Bamba,” the band followed it with La Pistola y El Corazón, an album steeped in traditional Mexican music.
It was a striking move after sudden pop stardom and an important statement about what kind of band Los Lobos intended to remain.
The album won a Grammy.
Grammys, Movie Soundtracks and Musical Detours
“La Bamba” may remain their most recognizable recording, but the band’s Grammy history stretches considerably further.
Los Lobos earned their first Grammy for “Anselma” in the 1980s and another for La Pistola y El Corazón. “Mariachi Suite,” recorded for Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado, brought them another.
Decades later, they were still collecting them.
Native Sons, the band’s 2021 collection interpreting songs associated with Los Angeles artists, won the Grammy for Best Americana Album in 2022.
The album was almost a musical map of the city that made them. Los Lobos tackled material associated with artists ranging from The Beach Boys and Buffalo Springfield to War and Jackson Browne while adding a title track of their own.
By then, Los Lobos had long since reached the point where their influences and the musicians they influenced had begun folding into one another.
In 2021, the National Endowment for the Arts named Los Lobos National Heritage Fellows, its highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.
And They’re Still Making Music
This isn’t a nostalgia act assembled to recreate a few hits from the 1980s.
Los Lobos remain a working band.
More than five decades after their formation, Hidalgo, Pérez, Rosas, Lozano and Berlin continue performing together, drawing from a catalog that can shift from Mexican folk music to blues, Tex-Mex, rock, soul and Americana over the course of a set.
That makes predicting a Los Lobos concert considerably harder than predicting the ending.
“La Bamba” may be the song nearly everyone recognizes.
It’s everything surrounding it that explains why Los Lobos are still here.
GA-20 Starts With the Blues
The choice of GA-20 as the opening act makes this a particularly well-matched bill.
The Boston-based band has built its identity around the stripped-down power of traditional electric blues.
Rather than smoothing the genre into contemporary blues-rock, GA-20 reaches backward toward the sounds of the 1950s and 1960s, when small combos, tube amplifiers and overdriven guitars could produce records that sounded both rough and immediate.
Their music draws from blues, early rock and roll and country, with an intentionally lean approach.
That makes GA-20 and Los Lobos different generations of a similar idea.
Both start with older American musical traditions without treating them as museum pieces.
GA-20 digs into electric blues.
Los Lobos pulls together blues, rock, Mexican folk music, R&B and the sounds of East Los Angeles.
On Saturday night, those paths meet in a Connecticut vineyard.
A Concert Among the Vines
Jonathan Edwards Winery changes the atmosphere of the show considerably.
This isn’t an arena or traditional concert hall.
The winery sits on a hilltop property in North Stonington surrounded by approximately 20 acres of vineyards. Its outdoor grounds have become a regular setting for summer concerts, allowing audiences to spread out with blankets and chairs rather than file into rows of fixed seats.
Jonathan Edwards opened to the public in 2001, but its winemaking story stretches from Connecticut to California.
The Edwards family’s early interest in the developing Northeast wine industry eventually led west to Napa Valley. Today, the winery describes itself as bi-coastal, producing wines from both Connecticut estate-grown fruit and grapes sourced from California vineyards.
For a Los Lobos concert, the vineyard becomes the venue.
Guests can bring lawn chairs, blankets and pop-up canopies and settle onto the grounds for the evening.
Outside food is allowed, making a picnic part of the experience, and food will also be available from a food truck.
Outside alcohol and other liquids aren’t permitted. Wine and other permitted beverages are available through the winery.
The concert takes place rain or shine, so watching the forecast and dressing for an outdoor September evening is part of the plan.
From East L.A. to North Stonington
Los Lobos began by playing music rooted in a particular place.
East Los Angeles shaped the band, but it never confined it.
Over the next five decades, those musicians carried that sound through clubs and neighborhood parties, onto major-label albums, movie soundtracks, Grammy stages and concert venues around the world.
Saturday brings the journey somewhere considerably different.
There will be vineyard rows instead of city streets and picnic blankets instead of theater seats.
But once the guitars, accordion, saxophone and voices start, more than 50 years of Los Lobos history come with them.
And yes, there’s a pretty good chance everyone will recognize at least one song.
Event Details
Event: Los Lobos with GA-20 at Jonathan Edwards Winery
Date: Saturday, September 5, 2026
Gates Open: 5:30 p.m.
Music Begins: 7 p.m.
Scheduled End: 10:30 p.m.
Headliner: Los Lobos
Opening Act: GA-20
Location: Jonathan Edwards Winery
Address: 74 Chester Main Road, North Stonington, CT 06359
Admission: $80 plus fees
Age Requirement: 21+
Setting: Outdoor vineyard concert
Weather: Rain or shine
Seating: Bring lawn chairs or blankets
Canopies: Pop-up canopies permitted
Food: Outside food permitted; food truck also available
Beverages: Outside alcohol and other liquids prohibited
Dogs: Not permitted for the concert
Los Lobos with GA-20 at Jonathan Edwards Winery brings together two generations of American roots music for an outdoor concert among the vines in North Stonington.
More information is available at the Event Website link below.
To purchase tickets, click the Event Ticketing link below.
Featured image is an artistic representation inspired by the event and may not depict the actual people, location, or activities shown.
Jonathan Edwards Winery
https://jedwardswinery.com/
Los Lobos
https://www.loslobos.org/