Susan Alcorn played my favourite musical instrument – the pedal steel guitar – and took it to new places with her experimental approach.
Amid the many moving tributes to Marianne Faithfull last week, it was easy to miss the news of another loss to the music world – experimental musician Susan Alcorn.
A gifted composer, arranger and improviser on her instrument – the pedal steel guitar – her music spanned every genre from country to classical to free jazz and far beyond.
This wonderful clip finds her explaining how she took an instrument associated largely with country-and-western music (which is what she began playing) and took it to places no one else had ever dreamed of doing.
She was also a lifelong campaigner for social justice, and in the weeks before her death had used concert appearances to urge her audience to stand up to the fear and fascism of America today in the era of Trump 2.0.
Alcorn first paid her dues in Texas country & western bands before beginning to expand the vocabulary of her instrument through her study of 20th-century classical music, Indian raga, visionary jazz and indigenous musics of the world; among her final albums were collaborations with musicians from Argentina and Chile.
She was born into a musical family in Cleveland, Ohio, listening to her parents’ big-band jazz and classical records, as well as pop radio. Her earliest musical experience was sitting beneath her mother’s piano as she played, in order to “play” the pedal.
At 13 she started to learn the guitar and was drawn immediately to slide playing after a random meeting with Muddy Waters. But her musical world changed at college in 1975 when she 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, listening to recordings by masters like Lloyd Greene and Buddy Emmons (from whom she took lessons), while also delving deep into 20th century classical music, electric blues and free and spiritual jazz.
Alcorn moved to Houston, Texas in 1981, drawn by the booming oil city’s clubs hosting nightly country & western swing bands, and was occasionally invited to sit in, as well as studying jazz improvisation and running her pedal steel through synthesisers to find new sounds.
Her first solo gig did not happen until 1997 at an arts space, following her immersion in the “Deep Listening” phenomenon pioneered by another experimental musician and Houston native, Pauline Oliveros.
Alcorn walked on to the stage without an idea, looked the audience in the eyes and began improvising – a turning point in her career. From that moment on, she made the decision that the vast majority of her concerts would be improvised.
In 2007 Alcorn and her family moved to Baltimore, where she died at the age of 71.