Susan Alcorn

Susan Alcorn is a pedal steel guitarist, improviser, composer, and bandleader. She has expanded her instrument's role in working far outside the country genre. Her original music reveals the influence of free jazz, avant-garde classical music, Indian raga, and many indigenous traditions and musics of the world. 2000's solo Uma established her reputation. Sur (2002), Curandera (2003), And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar (2005), and Touch This Moment (2010) cemented it. 2015's solo Soledad offered tribute to Astor Piazzolla in performing his compositions. A year later she released the solo Evening Tales and played on Mary Halvorson's seminal Away with You, as well as Nate Wooley's Columbia Icefield in 2018. 2020's Heart Sutra won international acclaim. In 2023, Canto, cut by Alcorn and a Chilean band, wed folk, nueva canción, free improvisation, and contemporary classical music. Alcorn was born in Cleveland, Ohio into a musical family. Her earliest musical experience was sitting under her mother's piano while she played -- Alcorn played the pedal. At home she was surrounded by the big-band jazz and classical music her parents listened to. She also enjoyed pop music via her transistor radio, registering her fandom for everyone from Petula Clark and the Beatles, to Aretha Franklin, Bobby Bland, and James Brown. At 13, Alcorn started on the guitar and experienced a deep affinity for the slide playing of Son House, Robert Johnson, Willie McTell, and Muddy Waters, as well as the dobro playing of innovators Mike Auldridge, Josh Graves, and Tut Taylor; she focused her energies on slide. ​At 16, Alcorn heard John Coltrane's "Invocation to Om" on FM radio. She bought the album. Soon thereafter, she discovered Edgard Varese's "Ameriques" the same way. These provided gave ground for her restless musical exploration. While attending college in 1975, Alcorn saw someone playing the pedal steel at a club and was entranced. The very next afternoon she bought one and began teaching herself to play. Alcorn eventually began playing with country & western and swing bands around Chicago. Not quite proficient, the scene's musicians offered no sympathy for her lack of chops. She later explained she was grateful for their brutality, as it taught her to listen more closely, not get lost, and to develop a thick skin. Alcorn listened to canonical pedal steel recordings by masters such as Lloyd Greene, Buddy Emmons, and others. She also delved deep into 20th century classical music, electric blues, and free and spiritual jazz. She even took a few group lessons from Emmons. Alcorn moved to Houston, Texas in 1981. The booming city's clubs hosted country & western swing bands nightly. She listened to Cliff Bruner, Bucky Meadows, Herb Remington, Ernie Hunter -- and was occasionally invited to sit in. She also studied jazz improvisation with Dr. Conrad Johnson. She credits his pentatonic approach to improv as key to her musical development. Despite an enduring love for playing country -- she continues to play it to this day -- the pull of the mysterious and spiritual in sounds, spaces, and dissonances offered endless possibilities for improvisational exploration. In 1990, Alcorn met composer Pauline Oliveros. The latter introduced her to the "deep listening" approach, wherein one listens to the sound itself apart from other environmental or musical considerations. In 1997, Alcorn performed her first solo gig at an arts space. She walked onto the stage without an idea, looked the audience in the eyes, and began improvising, encountering adventure and intimacy she had never before experienced as a musician. From that moment on, she made the decision that the vast majority of her concerts would be improvised. Alcorn released Uma, her debut album, in 2000 on Dove Records. Engineered by Charalambides' Tom Carter, it offered sparse accompaniment from bells and trombone. Written about in small journals and mags, it won critical notice in Europe and from the American vanguard music community. Two years later she followed with the CD-R release Sur. Curandera, another solo steel guitar outing, appeared in 2003. In addition to her own compositions and improvisations, Alcorn covered Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready" and influence Olivier Messiaen's "Sacrum Convivium." The improvised ensemble recording Concentration appeared in 2004: Alcorn led an ensemble that included Joe McPhee, Andrea Parkins, Audrey Chen, and others. The album drew significant attention in Europe, Asia, and the United States. Two years later, Alcorn released And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar, another solo outing. In addition to its seamless meld of composition and improv, she closed it with "*" a disguised composition by Italian songwriter Domenico Modugno. In 2007, Alcorn and her family moved to Baltimore. She and violinist/violist LaDonna Smith privately released Ambient Visage. In 2009 she appeared on the "Giving Out" half of saxophonist/vocalist Caroline Kraabel's double album In the Garden City/Giving Out. Pianist Annie Lewandowski played on the rest. Alcorn kicked off the second decade of the 21st century by releasing the widely acclaimed, improvised solo set Touch This Moment and touring the globe. A few months later, she released A&B, an improvised free jazz offering with guitarist George Burt. In addition to playing concerts, Alcorn collaborated with many vanguard musicians internationally. In 2012 she and Russian guitarist Misha Feigin issued The Other Side of Reflections, and a year later she, bassist Michael Formanek, and saxophonist Ellery Eskelin issued the free jazz date Mirage on Clean Feed. Alcorn's reputation spread to tango, classical, and world music audiences in 2015, when she released Soledad on Relative Pitch. The five-track album included one original and four compositions by Argentine nuevo tango composer Astor Piazzolla. Offered with tremendous discipline, sensitivity, and restraint, the album served Piazzolla's music with a poignant and ranging new approach. Formanek accompanied her on the original "Suite for AHL." During a tour break, she reteamed with Feigin for The Crossing. She followed it eight months later with Evening Tales, a set of nine improvisations with liner notes by musician/comedian Angela Sawyer. Later that year, the live quartet offering, 2​.​14​.​15 appeared digitally from Liminal Sounds. Across four improvisations, Alcorn was joined by trombonists Alex Heitlinger and Steve Parker, as well as Austin-based pedal steel guitarist Bob Hoffnar. In 2017, Alcorn, Ken Vandermark, and Joe McPhee met for the first time as a trio in an Austin, Texas studio; all were invited to perform individually at Ingebrigt Håker Flaten's Sonic Transmission Festival. Their completed album, titled Invitation to a Dream, was issued by Astral Spirits in 2019 and followed by three other collaborative outings: Live at Rotunda with drummer Chris Corsano and guitarist Bill Nace; Susan Alcorn, Norman Adams, Tim Crofts for Nova Scotia's Suddenly Listen Music, and Prism Mirror Lens with saxophonist Phillip Greenlief. All won notice in the global music press. 2020's Sister Mirror collected two unreleased collaborations. The first, a performance of Heitor Villa-Lobos Bachianas Brasileiras by cellist Janel Leppin and vocalist Habibzai, and a very special live recording by Leppin and Alcorn at the 2640 Space in Baltimore, Maryland in 2012. 2020 likewise saw the release of Heart Sutra, a major archival ensemble work also performed at the Baltimore space, for the Stephen O'Malley-curated Ideologic Organ label. It offered Alcorn's original compositions arranged by Leppin and performed in 2012 by Alcorn, vocalist Jessika Kenney, violist Eyvind Kang, bassist Skúli Sverrisson, cellist Leppin, Anthony Pirog on guitar, and Doug Wieselman on clarinets. Recorded the same year, the Susan Alcorn Quintet's Pedernal was recorded for Relative Pitch. They released it in September 2021. The steel guitarist's highest-profile outing to date included her band -- violinist Mark Feldman, guitarist Halvorson, bassist Formanek, and drummer Ryan Sawyer -- performed her compositions with discipline and inspiration; she scripted in improv passages to give her band room to create. That same year, multi-instrumentalist/composer Thollem McDonas' wholly improvised Astral Traveling Sessions with Alex Cline and Alcorn appeared on Astral Spirits, as did Bird Meets Wire -- a trio offering from Alcorn, saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, and cellist Leila Bordreuil -- released on Relative Pitch. In March 2022, Alcorn, clarinetist Patrick Holmes, and drummer Ryan Sawyer recorded a wholly improvised performance at Brooklyn's Union Pool. Relative Pitch released the gig as From Union Pool in January 2023. In November 2022, Alcorn, a lifelong social justice activist, traveled to Chile. She'd first visited in 2003 to study the language and music of the region, and fell under the spell of the music, musicians, activists, poets, former exiles, and concentration camp survivors. As she dug deeper into the country's musical traditions, she discovered that many Chilean songs were inseparable from the country's tragic history. She was deeply influenced by the regional nueva cancion, a socially conscious folk style outlawed and brutally repressed during Augusto Pinochet's 17-year rule. During the oppressive period, instruments were banned, and artists exiled, arrested, or murdered. In Chile, Alcorn formed Septeto Del Sur. The band includes guitarist Lulu "Toto" Alvarez, bassist Amanda Irrazabal, northern Chilean drummer and cuatro player Claudio "Pajaro" Araya, and his brother Pancho Araya on charanga and flute. It is rounded out by neuva cancion veterans Rodrigo Bobadilla on guitar and flute, and violinist Danka Villanueva. The cast recorded Canto, a collection of five Alcorn compositions with plenty of room for improvisation, and a reading of Chilean martyr Victor Jara's "El Derecho de Vivir en Paz." Canto was released on Relative Pitch in November 2023.
© Thom Jurek /TiVo