Susan Alcorn, the pioneering pedal steel player who took her instrument in experimental, improvisational directions, passed away yesterday. Impermanence is swift.
She was scheduled to perform this March at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville. She's played previous Big Ears, both in ensembles led by others (Nate Wooley, Mary Halvorson) and in 2018 on her own. Her band this year was to be a quintet featuring, among others, Halvorson. It wouldn't have surprised me if she had graced the stage in at least one of Suss' several Across the Horizon country ambient sets planned for Big Ears this year.
Alcorn was born in Cleveland in 1953. She started playing guitar at age 12 and began experimenting with slide guitar as a teen after randomly meeting Muddy Waters. She first heard the pedal steel guitar in a bar when she was around 20 and thought it was the most beautiful thing she ever heard. She got her start playing in country bands in Houston in the early ’70s and began experimenting with the instrument in the ’80s, running it through a synthesizer to mimic the sound of other instruments and arranging John Coltrane’s “Naima” for pedal steel.
“I was doing country gigs and listening to Albert Ayler, and people at the gigs would tell me I sounded different for some reason,” Alcorn told NPR. “When I got into Ornette Coleman, most of the musicians I knew in Houston didn’t want to play with me anymore because it was like I was out-of-tune or something.”
In 1990, Alcorn attended the first Deep Listening retreat organized by Pauline Oliveros, the accordionist and electronic music pioneer, who also lived in Houston. She credited her friendship with Oliveros with further expanding her understanding of what the pedal steel could do. Gradually, Alcorn built up a reputation as a one-of-a-kind visionary.
Alcorn collaborated with a staggering number of noteworthy musicians, including Oliveros, Jandek, Halvorson, Joe McPhee, Ken Vandermark, Josephine Foster, and many more. Tributes are pouring in today from other experimental titans like David Grubbs, Drew Daniel, and Wendy Eisenberg.
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