Susan Alcorn: Nueva Canción on Pedal Steel

LP: I've spent a bunch of time with the new record over the last few days. It's really quite powerful and lovely. I look forward to digging into a conversation with you about it, but I thought we could start with just a little bit about your journey and a little bit of background. One of the things that struck me in your biography was the diversity of music that you grew up with, even in your immediate household, the modern classical and pop music. It set the stage for your omnivorousness, your curiosity. And I'm just curious if you buy into the idea that being surrounded by a diversity of sounds prepares the ear in a way to be open. I'm asking the question in a specific way. In my own experience, there's been music that couldn't penetrate at first, and I had to come at it again after the prep work of listening to other music. I got to learn how to expand my ears. And I wonder if that organic process happened for you in the house you grew up in.

Susan Alcorn: So my parents basically listened to big band music, which encompassed everything from Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald to The Harmonicats or Mickey Finn. You know, those kind of names that don't mean anything to anybody who'll be younger than us. I liked some classical music. There are things that I liked in the big band music, but at the time, I thought, oh man, this is just... It was the 50s and 60s, and by the time I became more into music, it was the 60s, and there's a generation gap sort of thing in music, and I guess it's like people now say, "Hey, boomer," or whatever, I guess it was my version. (laughter) I didn't really care for it. I thought it was dumb. Not dumb, but old. So, I got a transistor radio when I was in fourth grade, which was a new thing. I started listening to the radio station. So it was the top 40, Petula Clark, and that sort of thing. That drew me into blues and folk music.

And when you're a certain age, depending on your personality or your psyche or whatever, everything is like a smorgasbord. It's oh, this, that, oh, wow. And I liked psychedelic music. The two things I guess that maybe headed me in this direction, although it took a while, were when I first heard John Coltrane on an underground radio station back when those were big, and the disc jockeys could choose whatever they wanted to play and that sort of thing. And the piece that I heard was, I think it was "Om (Closing Invocation)." And it was from an album, John Coltrane's His Greatest Years. I had to get that album back in Orlando, Florida, or Maitland, Florida, where I was living. I couldn't drive yet, plus I had to get in a little canoe and paddle it to this lake and then dock it where there was a record store nearby, order it, and get it a month later.

Then there was Freak Out! by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. And with 'Freak Out!', he had a long list of influences. There was a quote by Edgar Varèse. "Oh man, I gotta check out Edgar Varèse!" I did the same thing, got in the boat, and listened to his piece "Amériques." Amériques, like in 10th, 11th, 12th grade, so I take acid, to that record, when my parents weren't around and jump around and dance and all that sort of thing. I was really into blues. Yeah. I played slide guitar, and I saw Muddy Waters, which was a big thing. And then from there, it was, I don't know, there's just all these Bulgarian music, Hindustani music, African music, all these things.

Maybe back up a little bit. I was into blues, I played blues, I was into rock and that sort of thing, which I got from The Cream and Jimi Hendrix, who were popular at the time. When I was about 18 or 19, I was like, well, for one, I decided I never wanted to play an electric instrument again. I bought a dobro. I liked country rock, bluegrass, and later, what we would call classic country. Thanks. It just seemed fresh to me. It just, there's, I don't know, not innocence, that's not the right word for it, but it reminded me of sitting by a creek and just watching the water flow over the rocks, or, I don't know, fresh air.

And when I played dobro, things that I wanted to play on it were too difficult for the instrument. So I got into pedal steel guitar, and I started playing country music, what we called country back then, which they now call classic country. I really got into that. I moved to Texas in 1981 and played professionally for 20 years or so. But at nighttime, or not nighttime, daytime, because I'd play at night, I would listen to John Coltrane and try to learn how to play "Naima." I started to become aware of other music—in addition to that, other ethnic music, other classical musics, and taking all that in. And I wasn't in a place where I could study that or learn it. I don't know if I picked up what I could just from osmosis; I think that kind of stayed with me, and that informs the music that I play now.

LP: It's interesting, when you were talking about your early interest in the pursuit of the classic country music, And that simpler or organic or innocent tone to it or aspect of it, it seems like that was in the air at the time, almost as a reaction to like the bombast or the excess of a lot of the late sixties, early seventies, it seemed like it came out of the psychedelic movement, people going back to a simpler music or a more quiet sound after going through such a turbulent period. Was that at all part of the experience for you?

Susan Alcorn: I would say yes. That's what turned me on to country rock, to The Eagles, The Riders of the Purple Sage, that sort of thing. However, when I started playing country music, the people I was playing with, most of them who were my age or a few years older, never had that. They had grown up with that sort of music. And they knew all the, going back to the 1940s, which I had to learn too if I wanted to get gigs and play. That was like a whole different worldview. They'd never been through that. They probably didn't know who Poco or The Grateful Dead was, so it's a different scene for the most part. I think that affected me and The Band, the beginning of Americana.

LP: Two things you mentioned, The Grateful Dead and Frank Zappa, were also springboards for me into all kinds of musics. People who listen to this podcast have heard me say this before, but when I was around the same age as when you first heard Coltrane, I was reading an interview with one of the members of the Grateful Dead. They mentioned the John Coltrane record, 'Africa Brass.' And I need to go check that out as you do when you're exploring all these warrens of music. I bought it on cassette and brought it home, and it was impenetrable to me at the time. I had no context for this brass onslaught of music. It was so dense, but I figured if my heroes liked it, there must be something to it. And I stuck with it. And it's just funny how, again, your ears need to learn how to hear it. And that happened for me, and it unlocked a 50-plus-year journey of music that's just incredible. But I couldn't hear it at first, couldn't hear it at first.

Susan Alcorn: It's funny that you mention that because when I first heard it, I was like, "Wow, this is good." But my introduction to that was psychedelic music and just being weird. And maybe I was weird, different from other people, different things that affected me. And I think, especially when you're young, it's your nervous system, as much as it is your ears or your brain, that listens to and appreciates music. That's why, maybe the Beatles were so popular, it was just a different sound. The songs weren't necessarily all that different; there was just something about them; they just got into our bones. So, my introductory drug to all that was probably psychedelic music.

LP: Yeah, I can relate to that. Part of what you're saying, and I wanted to get to this a little later, but because you introduced the concept, when you came to that notion or that sort of theory about listening and the full body experience, the full integration of your nervous system, I'm curious as to whether that preceded or was born out of your interactions with Pauline Oliveros and the notion of deep listening.

Susan Alcorn: Maybe. I think I was thinking back and why did I like them? Yeah. Why did kids my age like them? Pauline opened a lot of other doors. Listening with your body is one of them.

LP: Before we pivot into some questions about the new record, I wanted to ask you about something else. And again, you mentioned seeing Muddy Waters and your interest in the blues and a lot of those sort of early mid-century blues players. Did you take anything from either seeing them perform live in and around Chicago or the music itself that you could point to that still is with you in your music as you've journeyed into, for lack of a better way to say it, more experimental grounds or more even cerebral musics? How does the music of the gut inform what you do today?

Susan Alcorn: As musicians, we draw on all the wells. They're always with us in some way. With blues, there was a simplicity to it, which is great if you're trying to learn how to play. Still, there's just something about that sound, like listening to old Charley Patton records or something like that, which, you know, I was a teenager at the time, and there, there's an emotional experience. There's a physical and an emotional thing to the blues; it's sad lyrics, and the same is true with country. There's a directness to it. And I think that directness stayed with me. I prefer direct ways of saying things with music.

LP: That's interesting. That brings me to ask about the music on 'CANTO.' Please tell me a little bit about your affinity and your journey to the music that you're exploring now on this new record.

Susan Alcorn: The inspiration for that album was in 1973. I was in college, and I was a left-wing activist at the time. And seeing the Chilean coup on TV, and just seeing the faces of these people, these... They're wearing scarves, it's cold, and these men with black hair and dark beards, and I don't know, it just hit me. Then in 2003, I was also a school teacher at the time, teaching English as a second language. I wanted to go somewhere to improve my Spanish. I could have gone to Mexico or Nicaragua or a hundred other places, but I chose Chile. That could have something to do with it.

I was at a language school, and the owners of the language school were former exiles from the Pinochet dictatorship. While I was there, I bought a guitar to study Chilean folkloric music, and I was already familiar with people like Mercedes Sosa, the Argentinian singer, and Violeta Parra, the originator of the new song, Nueva Canción, in Chile. I would buy CDs and videotapes. People would be in this public square. You say I want this and this, and then they'd come back, give it to you like a day later because they'd burned it themselves. You got to make money somehow. Yeah. I became friends with a young woman who grew up in Venezuela because her parents were exiled. I was given a ticket for admission to this meeting of the survivors of the concentration camps, the survivors of the torch. So I went to this meeting, and a few people got up and spoke. And before that, there was this choir singing Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." I started listening to more and more Nueva Canción music and started incorporating that into my solo sets.

And then, when Trump came to power, I guess my political instinct just woke up again. I would play these pieces in my solo sets, and I would talk about them. I would talk about what happened to Victor Jara when he was murdered. I would talk about where different tunes came from, and I think my solo sets in that way became a little bit more political, at least in part, and I would end it with a solo version of "A Song With the Birds," which was Pablo Casals, who was an exile from Spain after the Spanish Civil War. And that was his song, the song that he would play at the end of his performances and dedicate that to refugees everywhere. Yeah. I applied for a grant a couple of years ago, which I was thrilled to receive, and that gave me the money to go down to Chile and record that album.

LP: As I was approaching the music, there were so many entryways to it. There's the powerful melodic sense of that music and the emotional conveyance that is just inherent to it, but of course, there's also the political element that you talk about. When I first began listening, I wanted to see if that element would be present. What I found listening to your record was that even in the instrumental pieces, I could feel the presence of all that history, if that makes sense. I'm not massively knowledgeable. I have a one-on-one level of knowledge of what happened in Chile, and I know enough about that music to be dangerous, but it's not like I bring a fully informed knowledge base to it. Still, the communication is there.

It's very interesting to me that you say the times here brought that back up to the surface for you. When you mentioned starting to bring the songs into your performance repertoire, what was that act for you? Was it a protest? Was it a warning? It's one thing to resonate with the music again, but what were you hoping to achieve by presenting it?

Susan Alcorn: I just felt I had to, as far as my live performances and playing, maybe an arrangement of a Víctor Jara tune or "El Pueblo Unido" or other pieces. I felt a need to go in that direction. And people who came to my performances would come to me afterward to thank me. They said they never knew all this stuff was going on, that the U.S. was doing this over here and that over there. This all, of course, preceded Trump, but Trump was the thing that just got me going. I just felt I had to do something, and this was a way I could contribute.

LP: There's so much of the history that we know about that reemerges from that period.

Susan Alcorn: Most Americans, if you said Chile to them, would not have any idea about what happened there and their own government's role in it. It's really 50 years later and it's still non-existent in the educational realm of this country; we don't know about it as a people. It's not like Chile was alone in that. The same thing happened in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and El Salvador, and it's been going on at least since the 1950s, and it's still going on. When Trump came to power, I got on my horse and started thinking about that sort of thing and bringing it to the music. I was just like a person speaking in Central Park (makes noises like someone yelling through a bullhorn) (laughter)

LP: I'm very curious about the confluence of the musicians that were brought together to play this music with you. In the material I read about the album, there's a bit made of the fact that there are traditional folk players as well as experimental improv players. That could be a recipe for disaster, which clearly is not in this case, but it's not a given that it's going to work, right? That everybody will be able to find their place to contribute, or that the results will be as beautiful as they are here. Could you talk to me a little bit about how these musicians were assembled and how they were brought together? And what was their understanding of what the attempt was going to be here?

Susan Alcorn: Over the years, I have met various Chileans, partially because I talk about music and play that music when I play solo. And one of the Chileans I met was the guitarist Toto Alvarez, who's an experimental, wildly experimental kind of musician, like Derek Bailey or something from Chile. We became friends. We played a few times together in the years before that, and we would play a couple of Víctor Jara tunes in the middle of our craziness. When I wrote this, when I wrote the music, I wanted to put together a band. I had an idea of the instrumentation that I wanted. The only musician I knew in Chile was Toto. And the violin player, I had met her before. She had been playing with a Chilean prog rock group up in St. John's, Canada. It was when I played, and she came up, and we sang; she sang a Víctor Jara tune and played the violin while I played the steel; it just happened. So I kept her in mind, so I was not going to be annoying them. The rest of them were people that Toto pitched and the experimental musicians like Amanda Irarrázabal, the bassist. She's purely experimental, but she has a deep background in that kind of music. I think they've learned it growing up; it was in the air, and it was her who wound up singing that last tune, the Víctor Jara song, and then she did it here in puns. So Toto chose the musicians. The bass player, myself, the violinist, and Toto, the guitarist, were all familiar with free improvisation, which is a part of the record, and they could read better than I could.

I can write, but I can't read, so. The flute player had never improvised before, and he had only played classical music and Nueva Canción, a new song. So he had played Nueva Canción with one of the founders of that genre who just died last year. He had to improvise. The churrango player, who also played the quena, which is an Andean flute, and the drummer were brothers from the north of Chile and had more of the Andean, kind of Bolivian roots to the music and their outlook. So it was interesting, the improvisation. There were times when I'd explain this is what we're looking for. This is how to, especially when everybody's improvising at the same time. You don't want a train wreck, and you don't want everybody just being scared to play a note. I would give my view on how I was hoping that this would turn out. And the musicians, every one of them, were excited about the music. They felt we were doing something important because, as you said, Chile is not, and most people don't know that much about it. Chile, in a way, is like New Zealand. They think of themselves at the end of the world, way down in South America, separated from the rest of South America by the Andes, and separated far south to far north is just a thin little slice of the country. So, I think they were generally enthusiastic about their music, reaching maybe a different audience and an audience outside of Chile.

LP: One of the best sentences I've heard all day is about a Chilean prog rock band playing in St. John's, Canada. That's not something I expected to hear. It's beautiful.

Susan Alcorn: They were playing as a tribute to Astor Piazzolla and Nuevo Tango. Yeah, jazz tango. There was a festival up in St. John's, a gathering of the weirdest musicians, whoever could get there, and they just happened to be there. I was lucky.

LP: When you compose, what instrument do you use, or do you sit down with a sheet of paper?

Susan Alcorn: Basically, I compose a melody on my pedal steel, as it's what sings to me. So, in the three cantos in the middle of the album, there's a beginning and ending, which is just pedal steel and bass. I add the bass later and then build from there. I get ideas. Things come into my head. Sometimes, I use a piano to avoid being limited to what's comfortable on the pedal steel. The piano and then the Sibelius music notation software help me explore different ideas. I started on the pedal steel and then expanded from there. The other two pieces, "Suite para todos" and "Mercedes Sosa," I had written earlier and played as solos.

LP: That first piece that opens the record is so beautiful. It's profound and seductive. It's sequenced perfectly as the entry point to the record. It sets up everything about the album.

Susan Alcorn: When I wrote that piece, it was also a political piece. I was thinking of Mercedes Sosa, the singer, back in the early 2000s. I was also reflecting on El Salvador, as I had students who told me, "Oh yeah, one day someone came into our village and took most of the adults. I was hiding inside the house or under the bed." Those stories stuck with me. When I write, I often have a vision, almost like a movie or a dream. It's a dreamy, shadowy visualization, like a soundtrack to a movie. Canto No. 2, "Presente," was inspired by that. "Presente" is something people say in Latin America at political rallies and demonstrations, meaning "present" in both senses of the word. These kinds of things influence most of the music I write in general.

LP: So, you create visualizations of things you didn't necessarily witness but know of or were told about, and then you set those to music?

Susan Alcorn: Exactly. It's like something comes to me, like a scene in a dream, maybe related to reality or not. Often, I won't be playing; I'll just be sitting there thinking or watching a movie. Then, I'll rush to my pedal steel and start playing, and a melody will come out. That's what triggers my instinct to start writing music.

LP: Are you able to perform live with these musicians, or do geography and practicalities prevent that?

Susan Alcorn: That's an open question. We've been invited to play at a festival in the U.S., but it's financially difficult. Airfare, which festivals don't cover, and work visas are big issues. So, I don't know. I'm hopeful for the future. I might go down to Chile and play a few gigs there, which I'd really enjoy. But that's all a big 'if.'

LP: I imagine that playing both there and here would be important because of the dialogue between the two peoples and their shared history. It would be profound in different ways in each location. They're really neat experiences to look forward to.

Susan Alcorn: I hope it happens. You never know. I'm hoping and working at it, but whether I'll succeed, I don't know.

LP: In your musical journeys over the years, have you encountered other women who are master musicians, pedal steel players, or musicians who are pushing the boundaries or taking the pedal steel out of its traditional context in similar ways?

Susan Alcorn: There's not a lot of that with my particular instrument. My instrument, as people often say, is tied to the hip with country music. Many very good musicians play better than I do; they're virtuosos, but they're all within that sort of narrow confines. And they think what I'm doing is stupid. They say I don't know how to play, and I'm just faking it, their five-year-old can do it, that sort of thing. There are not many women playing pedal steel guitar. There's one woman, Heather Leigh, who plays experimental music in Scotland, originally from Houston. The female musicians I've really identified with are people like Mary Halvorson, Ingrid Laubrock, and Janel Leppin, a cellist from D.C. But not a whole lot of women are playing pedal steel to begin with. I can count them on the fingers of one hand and chop off two fingers while doing it. The number of women who play my instrument really well, outside of country music, is very small. Usually, I have to explain to people who have never seen it before.

LP: I think of it as second only to the harp in terms of difficulty to gig around with. I can't imagine lugging the pedal steel.

Susan Alcorn: Yes, you can take it apart, and it goes into a case, unlike the harp. It weighs about 50 pounds inside the case and takes time to set up. So, while other musicians might play their violins or guitars in hotel rooms or backstage, I can't do that with my instrument. It's not that mobile, but at least I get to sit down when I'm playing, so that's a good part.

LP: That's great. Are there any instances you're familiar with or have been part of where there's ensemble music for pedal steel, like multiple pedal steel players playing together?

Susan Alcorn: Yes, there is. It's rare, though. I played a festival in Copenhagen, Denmark, last summer with three pedal steel players: myself, the British steel player B.J. Cole, who played on Elton John's "Tiny Dancer," and Gustaf Ljunngren, a lap steel player from Sweden. That's the only time I've played with other steel players, but not very often. There was also an event where about ten California steel guitarists got together and did something, though I forget what it was. Sometimes, three or four pedal steel players will play together, doing a country song. It creates a big sound, a nice sound when done well, but it's not often done well.

LP: There are a lot of sonic possibilities for a chamber group. It'd be interesting.

Susan Alcorn: Yes, it's a baby of an instrument. There's just so much that can be done with it that has yet to be attempted.

LP: Speaking of that, have the seeds of your next project been planted?

Susan Alcorn: I've been working on an album of Olivier Messiaen's music for the pedal steel guitar. He was a great French composer, and his music is deep but in a different way than Chilean music. I might also do an album just of improvisation. With the Chilean music, there's that folk aspect to it. I was thinking this morning about doing something with country music because it's direct and simple, like blues. Country music and blues are mostly about one person's experiences. "Somebody stole my pickup truck, and my sweetheart ran off with my dog," that sort of thing. Then you get into Chilean Nueva Cancion and music like Pete Seeger's, which talks more about society. Then, with Messiaen and a lot of the experimental music I'm drawn to, it goes in another direction, more introspective. It's like accessing different parts of the human psyche. My music tries to tap into all of those levels, as we all have those aspects within us.

LP: Thank you for making time to talk about the record and for educating our listeners and me about the new songs from Chile. It's a beautiful album, and I've loved spending time with it. So thank you very much.

Susan Alcorn: Thanks, Lawrence. I'm glad you liked the record, and it's just been so nice talking with you. It made me think of some things I hadn't really considered you for, and that's always great. Yeah, thank you for that.