Within the world of free jazz, experimental music, improvised music, etc., you could rattle off plenty of names of musicians for guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, woodwinds, brass and a number of other instruments. Pedal steel guitar? I can only think of Susan Alcorn.
After first picking up guitar, Alcorn started out at pedal steel doing what nearly every pedal steel player does: play country and western music. But her interests and curiosity stretched far beyond one genre and she studied other music forms like avant-garde classical music, Indian ragas, and folk music styles from around the world to forge her own style while never completely leaving country, either. Simply stated, there is no one else on Earth who sounds like her.
Alcorn’s career has been marked mostly by solo performances, an occasional duet (as with Eugene Chadbourne) or even performing with large orchestras. She’s also taken on some notable sidewoman roles: She was the secret weapon on the Mary Halvorson Octet’s Away With You. But leading a full ensemble playing her compositions hadn’t really been part of Alcorn’s repertoire until now.
After a career than spans several decades, Pedernal (now out from Relative Pitch Records) finally gives us the full array of Alcorn’s talents as a musician, composer and bandleader all rolled up into one. She put together a very capable quintet for this occasion, enlisting Halvorson and drummer Ryan Sawyer, who along with Alcorn, backed Nate Wooley on his 2018 release Columbia Icefield. She also pulled in fellow Baltimorean Michael Formanek for bass duties and Mark Feldman to play violin. You could almost make a bluegrass band out of this but much of the music made by them are far, far away from bluegrass.
Alcorn does put this array of talent at hand to good use, as they’re all accustomed to working compositions with a lot of incalculability built in. Alcorn brings boundless diversity to every song. There’s a lot of Nashville of the titular track, the lonesome country vibe at the beginning, but the gentle easing of Feldman and Halvorson signal that something different is afoot and hearing Alcorn and Halvorson both pitch shift their instruments leads one to realize that Alcorn really is the Mary Halvorson of the pedal steel guitar. And it’s so much fun to behold Alcorn taking her instrument headfirst into unfamiliar territory.
“Circular Ruins” is ten minutes of fantastical sonic excursions broken up by brief statements of a theme. Following Alcorn’s lead, Halvorson and Feldman take their own instruments to the edge, but most fascinating are the resonances Alcorn is able to wring from the pedal steel and how it messes with the song’s harmonics. “R.U.R.” has parts that resemble Texas swing mixed in with Ornette Coleman; other times it’s just footloose freestyling.
The lengthy “A Night In Gdansk” could be considered avant-chamber music due to Formanek’s bowed bass pairing up with Feldman’s violin to create a micro string section for a spell. Moody and pensive, Alcorn leads the group a few times down a pitch-bending vortex. Sawyer temporarily asserts himself halfway through and make definable rhythm patterns that were previously only implied. In a later moment, Alcorn and Halvorson dip into some of their freakiest sounds together.
The band struggles with the count-off to start “Northeast Rising Sun,” but sound like the polished pros that they are the instant the music commences. This is also the most straightforward melody of the batch (a catchy one, at that) but Halvorson doesn’t care as she uses her solo turn to indulge in microtonalities and other feats of dissonance. The other soloists, Alcorn and Formanek, joyfully lather themselves in that fetching melody.
We’ve known for a long time that Susan Alcorn is an amazing pedal steel guitarist. With Pedernal, we now know that she is an amazing all-around artist, too.
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