Remembering Susan Alcorn: Bucking The Trends

All About Jazz is saddened to learn of the passing of Susan Alcorn—pedal steel guitarist extraordinaire. She died on January 31st of natural causes.

Perhaps more than any other pedal steel guitarist before her, Alcorn took her instrument into musical terrain not usually associated with it. She played country music for twenty years, but she also brought her instrument to bear on contemporary classical music, folk music, jazz and more experimental music.

Born in Allentown, PA in 1953, Alcorn studied piano, viola, trumpet and guitar as a child. Immersed in the blues, country and folk, it was her love of Muddy Waters that decided her to pursue slide guitar. Her inability to sightread was an obstacle to her studying music at degree level, so she instead took a degree in political science and history at Illinois State University.

At 22 she bought her first pedal steel guitar, having been captivated by a performance in a club the night before. She did not look back for the next fifty years.

For twenty years Alcorn played country music, making her mark in SE Texas, Central Texas and East Texas. It was a genre she had a deep respect for, as she told All About Jazz's Dom Minasi in a 2021 interview: "Country music is deceptively simple, and it's not as easy as a lot of jazz musicians think it is. It's also direct and to the point. There is improvisation, but unlike jazz where a solo may be 96 bars or more, in the country music I played, you had to fit it into maybe 4, 8, or 12 bars."

But Alcorn had always been drawn to more experimental, avant-garde music. Listening to Frank Zappa's Freak Out! (Verve, 1966) led her to the music of Edgar Varèse. Around the same time, she discovered John Coltrane. When she began to play jazz, it was the music of Ornette Coleman, Henry Threadgill and Steve Lacy that pulled her. It was chiefly through jazz that Alcorn developed her improvisational prowess.

Much later, in 1990, a meeting with composer and experimentalist Pauline Oliveros would profoundly affect Alcorn's approach to music: "I began to see the note itself as just one aspect of something much larger, which included the overtones, the harmonics, the static, the silences, " Alcorn told All About Jazz. "Subtle sounds sounds that never shaped themselves into recognizable notes, noise, that sort of thing. I think it opened me up in a lot of ways..."

Alcorn was nothing if not open to new musical experiences. In 2019 she recorded Invitation to a Dream (Astral Spirits) with Joe McPhee and Ken Vandermark. She also collaborated with saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and cellist Leila Bordreuil on Bird Meets Wire (Relative Pitch Records, 2020).

The music of nuevo tango legend Astor Piazzolla provided Alcorn with the inspiration for her beautiful album Soledad (Relative Pitch Records, 2015). Her album Perdonal (Relative Pitch Records, 2020) was a brilliant meeting of musical soulmates in the form of violinist Mark Feldman, guitarist Mary Halvorson, bassist Michael Formanek and drummer Ryan Sawyer. Alcorn could cut it with the best of them.

Latterly, Alcorn worked in a free-improvising trio with clarinetist Patrick Holmes and Ryan Sawyer, which rendered the album From Union Pool (Relative Pitch Records, (2023), and with Irish improvising saxophonist Catherine Sikora, with whom she recorded Filament (Relative Pitch Records, 2024). Since 2022 Alcorn played in pianist Michael McNeill's quartet, whose album Barcode Poetry (Infrasonic Press, 2024) was one of her last studio dates.

Other collaborators included Nate Wooley's group Columbia Icefield:, saxophonist Evan Parker, and Glasgow Improvisors Orchestra.

It was all a far cry from the days when Alcorn would play at rodeos, providing the soundtrack to the cowboys until the bucking horses and bulls would throw them off.

When asked by Dom Minasi if she had any advice for young musicians, Alcorn urged them to respect their instrument: "Treat it like a partner, a loved one, and not like an object to be mastered. A musical instrument is a sentient being—allow the instrument to tell its own story... Nameless and formless, that is the place to be. Ready yourself for the fleeting moments where it descends on you, goes through your instrument, and out to hearts, the audience, the world, and the universe. Now and forever."

Alcorn's own soundtrack to a life well lived came to an end on January 31st, 2025. She was married to photographer David Lobato. Her music, entrancing and bold, still resonates.