Review: Susan Alcorn’s ‘Pedernal’

Geography isn’t destiny, but it might explain some things about pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn and her new release, Pedernal (Relative Pitch Records, 2020). Alcorn is based in Baltimore, a place where the strange, unexpected and contradictory thrive. It is the birthplace of Edgar Allan Poe, Frank Zappa and John Waters, who wrote, “You can look far and wide, but you’ll never discover a stranger city with such extreme style. It’s as if every eccentric in the South decided to move north, ran out of gas in Baltimore, and decided to stay.”

Whether or not an accident of fuel economy brought Alcorn to Baltimore from her longtime home base of Houston, her project of legitimizing the pedal steel guitar in jazz and improvised music circles is at once eccentric and completely logical. After all, jazz is always hunting new sounds to add to the vocabulary.  Still, even though pedal steel players such as Speedy West and Buddy Emmons flirted with jazz decades ago, no one has nudged the boundaries of the instrument quite so far as Alcorn has.

On Pedernal, the very notion of boundaries is nullified. Yet, this isn’t an experimental album, even though the players are given plenty of room to move. The galloping “Northeast Rising Sun,” for instance, is an outright earworm, stretching a bouncing barn-dance melody over a descending G-major scale. The round-robin string of solos for the leader, violinist Mark Feldman, guitarist Mary Halvorson and longtime colleague Michael Formanek on bass are right out of the Appalachian string band tradition.

Drummer Ryan Sawyer, late of TV on the Radio, gives that cut its rhythmic giddy-up, but Pedernal is neither  Newgrass nor a crossover session. From time to time, things get weird.

The title cut, named for the New Mexico mesa that was a favorite subject of the painter Georgia O’Keefe, begins as a high, lonely cowboy melody by Alcorn over Formanek’s tolling bass. But the second time through, the tune jumps the rails and ascends into the darkness like a tumbleweed caught in a dust devil, only to drift back to earth. When the original theme returns with richer harmonization it only underlines the strangeness of what has gone before.

With its ghostly sustain and quavering, pitch-bending, the pedal steel  does strangeness and alienation very well. So, it’s no surprise that Alcorn conjures spooky, graveyard effects on “Circular Ruins,” abetted by Feldman’s jittery, poking solo. It’s a perfect soundtrack to an Expressionist silent film.

The sense of dread is even more effectively painted in the brooding, Shostakovian “Night In Gdansk.” A 13-minute soundscape inspired by a tense evening in the Polish city, the piece begins with an atmospherically noirish unaccompanied pedal steel melody that is soon joined by commentary from the strings. Feldman’s uneasy rhapsodizing ushers in a more hopeful section rich with glowing Messiaen-ic polychords. With minimal drums, this is through-composed chamber music for strings, a quartet for the dawn of time for the unusual ensemble of pedal steel, electric guitar, violin and double bass.

Even at her most playful, as on the whimsical “R.U.R.,” Alcorn keeps an eye on structural matters. The opening unison theme, almost Braxtonian in its marcato boppishness, drifts into a nearly swing-time rhythmic lane before breaking down into a mechanistic squabble.  It’s as though the Rossum’s Universal Robots of Karel Čapek’s titular science fiction play, have been mis-programmed. They wander and bump into one another until order is restored by the brief return of an explicit rhythm. After Alcorn hangs auroras of ghostly sustained chords over twinkly space music from Halvorson, the opening theme returns and the robots resume their march.

For all the improvisatory firepower in this ensemble, Pedernal is no blowing session.  It’s satisfying and brilliant evidence that pedal steel players not only can improvise in the most exalted settings, they can be formidable composers, too.  

Eccentric? No, more like brilliant, hon. 

Available now on CD, digital and on vinyl in December, 2020.

Tracklist: (1) Pedernal; (2) Circular Ruins; (3) R.U.R.; (4) Night in Gdansk; (5) Northeast Rising Sun. 

Personnel: Susan Alcorn (pedal steel guitar), Mark Feldman (violin), Michael Formanek (double bass), Mary Halvorson (guitar), Ryan Sawyer (drums).