A Guiding Light Has Gone Dark

Susan Alcorn, Fare, Sun Yizhou, Zhu Wenbo, and Zhao Cong

Saluting Susan Alcorn, a Musical Genius of Peerless Generosity and Openness

Susan Alcorn at Frequency Festival 2022, Chicago (photo: Julia Dratel)

Given how cataclysmic and baldly kleptocratic the whiplash-inducing chaos unleashed by the new administration in the US has been, it’s doubly painful and disorienting to process the loss of pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn, who died from natural causes on Friday morning, January 31. Observing the profusion on posts on social media about her unexpected passing has been staggering, revealing an impact that goes well beyond conventional measures of fame or influence. She was deeply connected to numerous musical communities that rarely intersect. Susan was a goddamned legend on so many levels, but her openness, friendliness, and generosity made it too easy to overlook how unique she was as both a musician and as a human being.

I didn’t know Susan well. I was privileged to present what is now her final performance in Chicago, when I brought her out for a stunning solo set at Frequency Festival in 2022, and I always enjoyed getting to talk with her when I saw her play in Chicago and in Berlin. I got a better handle on Susan’s remarkable life, creativity, and artistic ambition when I wrote a feature story about her for the Wire in 2020, on the heels of her remarkable quintet album Pedernal (Relative Pitch). The Wire has taken down the paywall for the story, for now, which you can read here. She was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1953, grew up in Cleveland, and began studying piano at age 3, but her musical trajectory launched soon after her family moved to Arlington Heights, a Chicago suburb, in 1970, where she was taken with the blues and, soon after, country music, particularly the pedal steel guitar which she encountered in a country-rock band while studying at Northern Illinois University in Dekalb. I was surprised to see the writer and retired music publicist Cary Baker—a music lifer who specializes in Americana—recall meeting her during those days in a touching Facebook remembrance where he wrote that Susan’s band the Phantom Prairie Dusters introduced him to the music of Hank Williams, Hank Thompson, Ernest Tubb, and George Jones. Frustrated by limited opportunities in the Chicago area, she eventually relocated to Houston, relying on contacts she’d developed as she tried to advance her pedal steel skills. She quickly found steady work playing in Texas honky-tonks.

But Susan was a deep, curious listener who never stopped growing and following her interests, which led her into free jazz and more expansive improvisational approaches. In 1990 she attended the first-ever Deep Listening retreat organized by Pauline Oliveros. Seven years later she improvised freely in public for the first time, cleaving a new pathway that she would follow for the rest of her life. Of course, there were other simultaneous pathways, whether the tango nuevo of Astor Piazzolla, Chilean folk music, and the haunting compositions of Olivier Messiaen. Susan always tailored her playing to any given context, but on her own she didn’t compartmentalize. On her first European trip she slipped a version of Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” into a performance at the London Musician’s Collective Festival of Experimental Music. But such moves were totally true to her aesthetic, which paid no heed to stylistic divisions—it was all music to her. In 2004 she was invited to play at the High Zero Festival in Baltimore, an experience that pulled her to the city three years later, where she met and began playing with bassist Michael Formanek and trumpeter Dave Ballou, leading to her entrance into the greater free jazz ecosystem, where she eventually became an important colleague to folks like trumpeter Nate Wooley, guitarist Mary Halvorson, and Chris Corsano, among many others.

The hands of Susan Alcorn (photo: Julia Dratel)

But as those opportunities emerged, Susan continued to chart her own journey, developing head-spinning arrangements of music by Piazzolla and Messiaen, while freely improvising with a widening cohort of players across generations. Beyond that musical openness, Susan possessed a deeply righteous political sensibility rooted in humanism. After visiting London in 2004 she was asked to write an essay about her day-to-existence playing country in Houston for the LMC’s Resonance magazine, which remains one of the most-clear eyed and personal examinations of the growing polarization of American culture. It was republished by Counterpunch, which has thankfully kept online—don’t pass up the opportunity to read it. In the days before her death she was openly freaked out by the onslaught of changes turning the country upside down. On Thursday she wrote:

It's like a fire hose of bad things coming down all at once. This is one of Himmler's tricks to help Hitler come to power. It's meant to confuse and disorient the opposition. We can't let that happen. We must each do everything we can to put an end to this, but it's not something we can do alone. Find a group in your area that is active in its resistance. Go to a meeting. Have discussions on what you can do. If you feel it's a good fit, become active. If it doesn't feel right, find a different one, but Do. Something.

Susan had a ton of incredible stories at her disposal and she knew how to tell them. She didn’t suffer fools and she had strong beliefs, but she was kind and worked hard to be sympathetic and consider different viewpoints. On Facebook she routinely had conversations with old Texas friends from her country days diametrically opposed to her politics, but she constantly tried to reason with them, patiently and kindly. It was astonishing to me. Susan also had a radically holistic view of music unfettered by categorization or schools of thought. A powerful post shared by a member of the rock band Big Bend shared the contents of a typically generous email from Susan, dispensing advice with directness and clarity, including the closing message, “Play music that speaks directly to you, of sounds that feel good to your bones and nervous system.”

Finally: the music. Alcorn was obviously a virtuoso, not only inspiring a new generation of pedal steel players to find their own sound outside of country music, but developing new techniques and pushing her own abilities to the breaking point. When we spoke for the Wire story she was suffering from injuries sustained by putting her body through brutal muscular exertion as she tried to translate Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” to pedal steel. She recovered, but that sort of dedication was yet another quality that set her apart. I’ll leave it up to you to find a way into Susan’s music if you don’t already know it, but the following selection hints at her remarkable breadth, imagination, and pure musicality. There will never be another one like her. For real.

A Tripartite Bill of Fare

On Friday, February 7 the Berlin improvising trio called Fare will get together for an evening at Donau115 in the wake of two albums they released on Enja last year. The music pianist Valentin Gerhardus, double bassist Felix Henkelhausen, and drummer Marius Wankel make together exists in a kind of rarefied air, subverting piano trio orthodoxy with a highly interactive approach that favors rumination over rhythm. The musicians tend to work in post-bop contexts, although they do muck around with various hybrid approaches. I’ve previously heard the pianist and drummer in Nissen Mosh, a quartet led by saxophonist Asger Nissen who plays with Henkelhausen in Jim & the Schrimps, the quartet led by Jim Black, and the bassist leads several strong groups, including Deranged Particles, whose debut album I had the privilege of writing the liner note essay for last year.

As you can hear below on “Seeds (Part 1),” the piece that opens the first of those two Fare albums—titled Ant Mills I and Ant Mills II—the gestures are exploratory, with Henkelhausen producing tartly striated harmonics using a bow while Wankel pursues a mixture of rustling utterances and frictive movement. Guided by patience, careful listening, and empathy, the trio repeatedly carves out a strangely restive calm. On the first album Fare never really delves into a groove, instead preferring to forge a kind of static hovering quality, as the musicians inhabit tightly confined spaces and investigate the possibilities within. Despite being completely improvised, the trio sticks to shorter durations—usually between 3-9 minutes—with each piece digging into a specific tactic or idea.

These two albums are named after a strange phenomenon in which a cluster of army ants become separated from their larger group. Without the scent of a pheromone to guide them, they begin to move in a continuously spinning circle, looping endlessly until they die from exhaustion. Obviously when hundreds of tiny insects are viewed from above that simple circle reveals endless variations in its overall shape and density, and that’s largely what Fare is doing with sound. The music isn’t circular per se, but from a distance its motion and orientation seem quite flat, but like a close examination of an ant mill its own music is riddled with small details and shifting patterns. The edges of the music aren’t smooth and its general mass avoids the monolith lumbering feel of drone music, but if the listener commits to noticing all of the sonic minutiae, the richness and variability of what they do becomes obvious. Gerhardus mixes broken melodic phrases and resonant chords, often letting overtones linger and decay while his partners engage in more creaky, tactile utterances that scratch, snap, and sizzle beneath. But there’s never a rigidly fixed role, as all three instrumentalists toggle between foreground and background, participating in a delicate sound sculpture. The second album is a bit more kinetic, but the general modus operandi remains unchanged. “Cyrill,” the opening track on Ant Mills II, delivers a comparatively forceful drive, with Wankel producing a steady pulse with evolving cymbal patterns, Henkelhausen working over propulsive riffs a la William Parker with constant but subtle variations, and Gerhardus splitting open a couple of terse motives into countless new shapes over the course of its nine-plus minutes. Check it out below. The track fades out, but it feels as though it could unfold for eternity, its ameboid outline endlessly morphing into new silhouettes.

Sun Yizhou, Zhu Wenbo, and Zhao Cong: Subverting the New Quotidian

A clutch of abstract improvisers from China wraps up a Berlin visit with a stacked round robin lineup with a slew of Berlin heavies on Tuesday, February 4 at Galiläakirche. The event follows a smaller gathering this past Sunday at Richten25. The December issue of the Wire featured an in-depth by writer Daryl Worthington that looked at Sun Yizhou, along with Zhu Wenbo and Zhao Cong, three leading figures on the Beijing experimental music scene. They’re all part of a community that formed in the wake of the Japanese onkyo scene, which introduced us to the likes of Taku Sugimoto, Toshi Nakamura, Sachiko M, Tetuzi Akiyama, and Otomo Yoshihide, among others, back in the 1990s. Of course, the story isn’t that simple (and I’m leaving out the whole Korean scene, which kind of bridged those two worlds, conceptually). They all embraced a kind of reductionism that found common cause with the so-called echtzeitmusik community in Berlin—to say nothing of the rest of Europe and the US.

Sun Yizhou (photo: Boway Young)

Sustaining a fiercely experimental music scene is hard anywhere, and it seems especially tough in China, but a kind of situational improvisation ethos has animated these folks who embrace changing circumstances as much as sound itself. Whether it’s turning to discarded consumer electronics as jerry-rigged sound machines or playing concerts under a highway overpass (while embracing the post-Cagean role of ambient sound), these improvisers are more about the very act in its most mercurial or most quotidian state more than they are about a piece of music. As Sun says in the Wire piece, “No matter what kind of equipment or objects someone plays, I think the concept is more important. The concept itself is the material.” I’m intrigued by how these ideas will mesh with the Berlin aesthetic. Folks like trumpeter Axel Dörner and percussionist Burkhard Beins go back decades with this approach, although it’s certainly changed over time. But however disruptive or deconstructed the Berlin aesthetic has been, I still hear an underlying musicality that resists pure conceptualism. On Light Industry International Co. (Ftarri), a new album Sun made with Israeli tenor saxophonist Tom Soloveitzik—who will also perform tonight—the latter’s instrument can’t help but pierce the conceptualism, as it still sounds like a saxophone no matter how radical the attenuated sound gets. Hard to say if that matters to Sun, but I sense a more connective presence, subtly rippling through the lengthy “end view,” below, which has a pinch of that, uh, old-school lowercase thing.

“A Night With Zoomin’ Aloe” references the two cassette labels run by Sun and Zhu, respectively, Aloe and Zoomin’ Night, the second of which started back in 2009. Zhu plays clarinet in addition to the “objects” favored by his colleagues, and his aesthetic has also a bridging quality. A couple of years ago he made twice (Erstwhile), a characteristically strange, evocative, and creatively sustained work with Yan Jun that moved through a richly varied sequence of settings, as deliberate if unwieldy electronic noises interrogate field recordings and everyday sonic settings. Yan exerted a strong impact on the local scene during his time in Berlin, fostering some of the connections on display with this concert, and while I don’t sense the former’s anarchic sense of humor, Zhu definitely shares a large sonic conception. You can hear a five-minute excerpt below. The killer lineup also includes trumpeter Liz Allbee, clarinetists Kai Fagaschinski and Michael Thieke, trumpeter Carina Khorkhordina.

Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week

February 4: A Night With Zoomin’ Aloe (Axel Dörner, trumpet, Burkhard Beins, percussion, Carina Khorkhordina, trumpet, Kai Fagaschinski, clarinet, Liz Allbee, trumpet, Michael Thieke, clarinet, Tom Soloveitzik, saxophone, 孙一舟 Sun Yizhou, electronic device, 赵丛 Zhao Cong. object, and 朱文博 Zhu Wenbo, clarinet, tapes, objects), 7 PM, Jugend[widerstands]museum, Galiläakirche, Rigaer Str. 9, 10247 Berlin

February 5: Schnee at 25, day 1 (Burkhard Stangl, guitars, tools, and Christof Kurzmann, ppooll, computer), with Kai Fagaschinski and Michael Thieke, clarinets, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin

February 6: Schnee at 25, day 2 (Burkhard Stangl, guitars, tools, and Christof Kurzmann, ppooll, computer), with Annette Krebs, konstruktion#4, Andrea Neumann inside piano, and Lorena Izquierdo, voice, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin

February 6: Delcan Forde Trio With Bill McHenry (Declan Forde, piano, Igor Spallati, double bass, Ugo Alunni, drums, and Bill McHenry, tenor saxophone), 9 PM, Zig-Zag Jazz Club, Hauptstraße 89, 12159 Berlin

February 7: Gordon Grdina (Gordon Grdina, oud, guitar, Eylem Basaldi, violin, Hamin Honari, tombak, daf, Christian Lillinger, drums, and Ghalia Benali, vocals), 7:30 PM, Pierre Boulez Saal, Französische Straße 33d, 10117 Berlin

February 7: Delcan Forde Trio With Bill McHenry (Declan Forde, piano, Igor Spallati, double bass, Ugo Alunni, drums, and Bill McHenry, tenor saxophone), 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin

February 7: Fare (Valentin Gerhardus, piano, Felix Henkelhausen, double bass, and Marius Wankel, drums), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin

February 8: Berlin Sacred Harp, shape note music for treble, alto, tenor & bass; Quentin Tolimieri, piano, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin

February 8: Daniel Erdmann, saxophone, Moritz Schumacher, saxophone, Julia Kadel, piano, Jan Roder, double bass, and Kay Lübke, drums, 8:30 PM, Kühlspot Social Club, Lehderstrasse 74-79, 13086 Berlin

February 8: Tenor Madness (Bill McHenry, Julius Gawlik, Malin Wättring, and Fabian Willmann, tenor saxophones, Lisa Wulf, double bass, and Sun-Mi Hong, drums), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin

February 10: FACS; Berliner Lvft; Novo Line, 7 PM, Neue Zukunft, Alt-Stralau 68, 10245 Berlin