Susan Alcorn takes pedal steel into uncharted territory
She’s not alone: in California, Chas Smith uses his mutant pedal-steel guitars to evoke the expansive weirdness of the high-desert landscape, while in the U.K. BJ Cole has brought shimmering steel-guitar atmospherics into the realm of ambient music.
But no other musician has done more to liberate the pedal steel from its country-and-western straitjacket than Susan Alcorn—and she’s done it by expanding in all directions at once.
On her most recent album, Soledad, she plays the haunting melodies of tango master Astor Piazzolla. On YouTube, she can be seen performing O Sacrum Convivium, by the influential French composer Olivier Messiaen. And when she comes to Vancouver for the annual Improvised Music Meeting, she’ll likely go completely freeform, as she has already done with such luminaries as saxophonist Evan Parker and guitarist Mary Halvorson.
Perhaps even more remarkably, she’s accomplished all this without turning her back on the music that paid her bills for 20 years: honky-tonk country. Although she no longer plays roadhouses “eight nights a week”, Alcorn still understands the beauty of the twang.
“With country music, I liked the immediacy of it,” she explains in a telephone interview from her Baltimore, Maryland, home. “You’ve got maybe two bars, at most, to state what you’re going to do in a solo. It’s like haiku, you know. There’s a certain rigid form, and if you go outside of that form it’s not haiku anymore—but within that form there’s a universe.”
Alcorn has enjoyed a diverse musical education. Her mother sang in the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, under the direction of legendary maestro George Szell, and played piano at home. Psychedelic rock and Muddy Waters’s microtonal blues slide were influential, she adds, while encountering Messiaen’s Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum on her car radio proved a watershed moment.
“I was on my way to a gig, and I just had to pull over,” she recalls. “With my little ‘I can do anything’ hubris, I thought, ‘Well, I can do this!’ So I ordered the score, and it’s for, like, 35 instruments, and they’re all playing a half-step apart… I couldn’t do it, obviously, but I felt ‘Never give up!’ ”
Messiaen’s music inspired Alcorn to add two extra strings to her guitar—she now plays an idiosyncratic 12-string steel—and alter her tuning to accommodate low bass notes. But the real key to developing a voice on any instrument, she stresses, lies in realizing that it’s essentially a device that converts vibration into sound.
“I’ve always thought that all instruments are basically alike.…and that each instrument has unlimited potential,” she explains. “The bagpipes, banjo, the jaw harp, what have you—if it’s played right, and if it’s played with attention to minute detail, there are no limits.”
Susan Alcorn performs at the Western Front on Friday and Saturday (March 24 and 25), as part of the Vancouver Improvised Music Meeting. For more info, visit www.barkingsphinx.com/.
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