Susan Alcorn named her new quintet album Pedernal after the New Mexico mesa where Georgia O’Keeffe lived nearby, frequently painted, and had her ashes scattered when she died in 1986. Alcorn spent May of 2019 in a rented apartment there in near total isolation, drinking in the gorgeous vistas, taking hikes and writing some of the music that ended up on the new record. “It was out of the way,” she says. “So every day I would go walking around, sometimes I’d walk down the side of the mesa and just sit there staring at the Pedernal, I went once every two weeks for groceries, the nearest grocery store being an hour and a half away.”
Based in Baltimore, Alcorn has rarely had such an opportunity to leisurely contemplate, compose and explore for an extended duration – that is, until earlier this year when the pandemic shut down nearly all performing opportunities in the US. She’s been working steadily as a gigging musician since 1980, when she moved to Houston, Texas to play country music. But the album, made with a stellar jazz ensemble including guitarist Mary Halvorson, violinist Mark Feldman, bassist Michael Formanek and drummer Ryan Sawyer, suggests the experience in the South West was profound, as it contains some of the most ravishing, multilayered and dynamic music she’s yet released. Incredibly, it’s the 67 year old musician’s first record as bandleader.
The album arrives as the pedal steel guitar has been enjoying a resurgence, particularly outside its native home in country music. Whether the ambient soundscapes of Bay Area musician Chuck Johnson, the noisy improvisations of the Glasgow based Heather Leigh – who got her first pedal steel from Alcorn – the atmospheric rock grooves of Chicago’s Mute Duo, or the cosmic twang of Norway’s Geir Sundstøl, the singular, unwieldy instrument has been applied in new ways and in unexpected contexts more than ever in recent years. Yet no one has forged more avenues of expression for the instrument than Alcorn. For many of these newer practitioners the pedal steel is but one part of their musical arsenal. In her early years, Alcorn fooled around with cornet, viola, guitar and other string instruments, but ever since catching a country rock band featuring Chicago journeyman musician Rick Mann back in the mid-1970s, she has displayed an unwavering devotion to the pedal steel.
If some of Alcorn’s key country influences – Buddy Emmons, Lloyd Green and Maurice Anderson – were technical wizards with a mastery she modestly says she lacks, none pursued so many disparate possibilities for the pedal steel. Alcorn’s curiosity has always cut across genres, bleeding together interests as disparate as Indian classical music, tango, free jazz and 20th century composition through her own sensibility. Her playing can be dreamy, atmospheric or slashing, but it’s almost always rooted in melody,
articulated with the liquid sustain and microtonal detail the pedal steel is famous for. “The difference between me and some of these other pedal steel players is that I came up through the pedal steel. I learned how to play playing country music, and for pedal steel you pretty much have to study country to get the technique. Technique for an instrument is extremely important. A good kind of technique is working with your instrument, and a wrong-headed view of it is to treat it like you’re trying to whip a dog or a horse to get it to run for you.”
Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1953, Alcorn spent her early teenage years near Orlando, Florida, where she began drinking in music, eventually discovering the blues in the midst of the folk revival. She fell in love with the slide guitar, as practised by prewar bottleneck players like Robert Johnson and Son House, through the electric style of Muddy Waters. When her family moved to Chicago’s Arlington Heights in 1970, the lure of live blues began pulling her into the city to hear the music in person. “I saw Muddy Waters at Alice’s Revisited a couple of times and I loved the feeling from the slide,” she recalls. “There was a certain energy and an electrifying sound.”
By the time she was attending Northern Illinois University – where she studied political science and history – she earned money driving a taxi cab while playing in local blues rock bands, but her listening habits also included country, particularly in its more rustic form. For reasons she can’t remember, she sold her electric guitar and began playing mandolin, banjo, acoustic guitar and dobro, which provided a closer link to her slide obsession, which now included the pedal steel sound she heard on records.
“I had heard the instrument and I had tried to emulate it on the dobro, which I was playing at the time,” recalls Alcorn. “I would try to stretch the strings behind the bar to get them to sound like they were sliding, like a pedal steel would, with one string moving while the rest stayed still.”
But her true course was set after seeing Rick Mann on pedal steel at a bar in DeKalb. Obtaining a pedal steel guitar of her own was one thing; finding lessons how to play it proved more difficult. “There were some men who played, but the culture around that instrument and country music, especially in the Chicago area, was those who knew, didn’t want to share it.” She took a week of lessons in Nashville in 1978 but otherwise she’s largely self-taught.
Eventually she grew frustrated with the lack of playing opportunities in the Chicago area and in 1980, as a country craze driven by the John Travolta film Urban Cowboy took root in the US, she contacted Houston pedal steel great Herb Remington, a veteran of Bob Wills & The Texas Playboys, who also built and sold his own instruments. “He said if you can play at all, you can work down here,” says Alcorn. “I had a gig the second night I was there and I worked for a week before my first day off. There were really good steel guitarists in Texas. To work, I had to up my game. Embarrassment is a strong motivator for me. The musicians in Chicago were really good, but they didn’t necessarily know the ins and outs of that genre, the unspoken rules.”
Immersing herself in the local country scene, she worked mainly with local bands at area dance halls – and sporadically with higher profile acts like Asleep At The Wheel, Hank Thompson and Johnny Gimble. As the decade progressed work opportunities became erratic. “Its economy was tied to the oil business and when oil prices were down the city would kind of fold, and when they came back up, it was like boom or bust. In the late 80s there was a big bust and I think there was a cultural change in a lot of country music. There were more trios, so instead of having a fiddle or a steel, you’d have a synthesizer player who would do all of that.” Since 1980 she had worked part-time as a substitute teacher, and a decade later she went fulltime, although she continued gigging when possible. Her innate curiosity led her to play in different settings including ad hoc jazz combos, for example, but most folks she played with were far more conservative in their tastes. “Music that we take for granted, like [Ornette Coleman’s] “Lonely Woman”, that sounds absolutely beautiful and lyrical, a lot of people are just, ‘Uh, it’s out of tune’, or whatever.
“What I was listening to more gradually in my free time was other things – qawwali music or Bulgarian folk music or Cecil Taylor – and I think free jazz was the biggest part of it back then, and that’s what I was working on. I would just take the steel guitar and do country music for the gigs. I think that once you stop growing with a certain genre of music you lose touch with it.”
In the early 1990s she attended the first ever Deep Listening retreat with Pauline Oliveros, a Houston native whose mother gave piano lessons to Alcorn’s two daughters. A burgeoning friendship further opened up her mind about music, and in 1997 she experienced a breakthrough performing at a Houston series called 12 Minutes Max. “I played for 12 minutes and people sat there and didn’t throw things at me. It was the first time I improvised freely solo. The reception was decent, but more importantly something inside my head said that this can work, musically.”
In The Wire 203 in 2001 Oliveros championed Alcorn’s first solo album Uma, which in turn launched her international career. Later that year she was invited to perform at the London Musician’s Collective Festival of Experimental Music, and she slyly included a version of Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” in the middle of a freely improvised set. As a solo player she began making regular trips to Europe; often she’d be paired with another improvisor for a second set. Meanwhile, her opportunities as a country musician in Houston declined precipitously.
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Susan Alcorn | The Wire | 35
