Susan Alcorn, who devised a lexicon for the pedal steel guitar in the realm of creative and improvised music, died on Jan. 31 in Baltimore. She was 71.
Her husband, David Lobato, confirmed her death, to unspecified natural causes.
Though she began playing pedal steel in its traditional context of country-western bands and honky-tonk bars, Alcorn’s incisive curiosity and searching investigation of a boundless range of music led her to reimagine the instrument’s possibilities. In jazz and new-music circles, she was a vital collaborator with the likes of guitarist Mary Halvorson, trumpeter Nate Wooley, saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and bassist Michael Formanek, among others — visionary fellow composers who recognized the unexplored pathways that Alcorn brought to their already-expansive palettes.
“Susan was a deep, funny and kind human being and an inimitable musician with real integrity,” Laubrock tells WRTI. “She was one of the most interesting improvisers I have ever played with, and I valued every chance I had to do so. While on tour, I often found myself talking to her about arts, politics, and music — especially her experiences as a woman in country music in Texas. She was a real trouper and a force of nature.”
Born in Allentown, PA on April 4, 1953, Alcorn was raised in Cleveland, OH, where one early musical memory seemed to seal her fate: sitting under the family piano as her mother played, working the pedals. She was a typical teenager of the era, listening to The Beatles, Petula Clark, Aretha Franklin and James Brown on the radio, though her horizons broadened one day when she heard a DJ play John Coltrane, and then happened upon an album by the composer Edgard Varèse.
She picked up the guitar at 13, and began frequenting blues clubs after her family moved to a Chicago suburb in 1970. She switched to pedal steel while in college, and began playing with country-western bands around the city — an activity that only accelerated after her family relocated to Houston, TX in the early ‘80s.
Alcorn’s sonic imagination expanded immeasurably in 1990, when she met and studied with the maverick composer Pauline Oliveros. She seems to have been irrevocably changed by Oliveros’ philosophy of Deep Listening, becoming a trenchant explorer of musical expression. Invited to play Baltimore’s High Zero festival in 2004, she moved to the city a few years later to become entrenched in its local experimental music scene.
Few listeners, however eclectic their tastes, consume the full spectrum of music as voraciously as Alcorn seemed to do. Far from indiscriminate in her tastes, she nonetheless sought out the emotional core of whatever sounds fascinated her in the moment, working to translate that passion into her own playing. That dedication was always fueled by her fervent and deeply-held political commitment, which made community an indelible component of her improvisational practice.
“I'm influenced by everything,” she wrote in a “musical autobiography” posted to her website, “and I can’t think of a genre of music that doesn’t interest me. Music is simply part of being human; it’s always been with us, and it is equally spread through every culture.”
By way of illustration, Alcorn’s 2023 album Canto blends free improvisation and contemporary classical influences with folk and nueva canción traditions encountered during her travels to Chile. The music was partly informed by her visceral reaction to the autocratic regime of Augusto Pinochet, and over the course of a conversation about the album, Alcorn free-associated other sparks of influence — veering between jazz legend Oscar Peterson and Argentine tango master Astor Piazzolla; composer Olivier Messiaen and heavy metal bands Metallica and Arch Enemy; Native American dance music and Ennio Morricone soundtracks.
Nowhere was this penchant for sharp-eared listening more evident than in Alcorn’s work with free improvisation, in which she summoned a ceaseless variety of melodies, textures and environments from an instrument so often relegated to a proscribed role in a single genre. But she was also a gifted composer, as she revealed in full on the captivating 2020 quintet album Pedernal, which featured Halvorson, Formanek, violinist Mark Feldman and drummer Ryan Sawyer.
The High Lonesome wail of Alcorn’s country roots emerged often, but could evoke landscapes and emotions far removed from the Americana south. She could play with the rapid-fire dexterity of a shredding rock guitarist or the fluid elasticity of a fusion virtuoso. She could evoke the austerity and harsh angles of a contemporary classical composer or conjure imposing, windswept landscapes, as she was called on to do in Nate Wooley’s cinematic Columbia Icefield.
“I feel her absence acutely, on both a musical and personal level,” says Halvorson, who also featured Alcorn in her octet, on the acclaimed 2016 album Away with You. “Susan was a beautiful human being, and a true innovator of the pedal steel guitar. In fact she was one of the great improvisers of our time, on any instrument. Whatever music Susan was a part of she brought to new heights. Her playing was melodic, soulful, wild and deep… In my octet, sometimes she’d veer off and transform a song entirely, like magic.”
