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From Sergio Mendes to Susan Alcorn
by Jerome Wilson
This show covers a wide swath of creative music, going from Sergio Mendes and Julie Driscoll to June Tyson and Susan Alcorn. Don Byron and Ryan Keberle are among the others who appear on the program. Playlist Henry Threadgill Sextett “I Can't Wait Till I Get Home" from he Complete Novus & Columbia Recordings of Henry Threadgill & Air (Record Label) 00:00 David Hazeltine “Face to Face" from The Classic Trio Vol. II (Sharp Nine) 00:56 Danilo Perez ...
Continue ReadingColumbia Icefield: Ancient Songs of Burlap Heroes
by Jerome Wilson
Trumpeter Nate Wooley can create impressive large-scale compositions. His Seven Storey Mountain VI, (Pyroclastic, 2021) is a massive work, dealing with the rights of women, that used fourteen musicians and singers. His group, Columbia Icefield, achieves similar results with just four members, Wooley himself on trumpet and amplifier, Mary Halvorson on electric guitar, Susan Alcorn on pedal steel guitar and Ryan Sawyer on drums plus Mat Maneri and Trevor Dunn guesting on some tracks. This music moves at a glacial ...
Continue ReadingColumbia Icefield: Ancient Songs of Burlap Heroes
by Troy Dostert
Nate Wooley refuses to make trivial music. Whether the endlessly creative trumpeter and composer is rethinking the relationship between artistic production and community, as on Mutual Aid Music (Pleasure of the Text, 2021), or pursuing ways to re-envision music's spiritual potential, seen most recently on 2020's Seven Storey Mountain VI (Pyroclastic Records), he always provides his listeners with a lot to ponder. This is no less evident with his Columbia Icefield project, which dives headlong into humankind's fraught relationship with ...
Continue ReadingSusan Alcorn: Another Way
by Dom Minasi
If you are not into improvised music, you may not know Susan Alcorn. Take it from someone who has listened and played with her, she is a giant. I never heard of Susan till one Sunday night at the legendary CBGB's Sunday Night Avant-Garde series where she performed with tenor saxophonist, Joe Giardullo. I have never heard pedal steel guitar played like that. I thought you only heard them in country bands. That night, Susan proved me wrong. ...
Continue ReadingSusan Alcorn / Leila Bordreuil / Ingrid Laubrock: Bird Meets Wire
by John Sharpe
Three accomplished improvisers of different generations meet in the studio on All Fools Day 2018 to explore some common and not so common ground. Although pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn started out in C&W, she takes her instrument to realms never envisioned by its originators. One could make the same claim for Brooklyn-based French-born cellist Leila Bordreuil, though here the precedents are more numerous, while the similarly domiciled German saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, one of the brightest stars in the New ...
Continue ReadingSusan Alcorn, Leila Bordreuil, Ingrid Laubrock: Bird Meets Wire
by Troy Dostert
It may be impossible for anyone to free the pedal steel guitar entirely from its roots in country music but, if anyone can, Susan Alcorn would have to be the leading candidate. She has a phenomenal range on the instrument, capable of everything from folk-drenched Americana to abstract excursions, and she will sometimes combine her variegated tendencies on the same release, as she did on Pedernal (Relative Pitch Records, 2020), using a quintet to embody her atmospheric meditations. Here she ...
Continue ReadingSusan Alcorn Quintet: Pedernal
by Troy Dostert
Pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn has achieved the enviable feat of commanding her own instrumental niche in the jazz world. Much like Toots Thielemans' harmonica, Gary Versace's accordion or Béla Fleck's banjo, she seems to have a unique role all to herself, at least until her substantial talents eventually spawn a host of imitators. From her beginnings playing traditional country and western in the 1980s, she has branched out considerably, in the last decade forging creative partnerships in the free ...
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