Pedal steel innovator Susan Alcorn combines Chilean folk and nueva canción with free improvisation and contemporary classical on breathtaking new album
Due out November 10, 2023 via Relative Pitch Records, CANTO features Alcorn’s Septeto del Sur, a wide-ranging group of Chilean improvisers and folk musicians
“Wild and beautiful and disturbing and downright bloody odd in turn. Frankly, trying to describe Alcorn's music is a bit like trying to paint wind: you're better off just turning it on and letting it happen.” – Bob Fitzpatrick, The Guardian
“Susan Alcorn pulls an energy out of the pedal steel that feels both ancient and otherworldly.” – Lars Gotrich, NPR
Throughout her career Susan Alcorn has extended the reach of the pedal steel guitar, branching out from her roots in the more traditional realms of country and folk to encompass progressive jazz, free improvisation, contemporary classical and new music, and a broad spectrum of creation in the spaces in-between. On her new album, CANTO, Alcorn expands her sonic world yet again; inspired by her travels to Chile, the enrapturing sounds of the country’s nueva canción movement and her lifelong dedication to social justice, Alcorn has melded elements of South American music with her already wide-ranging influences to craft an impassioned set of music far beyond idiom.
Due out November 10, 2023, CANTO features Alcorn’s Septeto del Sur, a new ensemble featuring a cross-generational group of musicians versed in folk and improvisational traditions. Last November the Baltimore-based pedal steel player traveled to remote María Pinto in Chile’s coastal mountain range to record a set of original music, complemented by a song by the legendary Chilean folk singer Victor Jara.
CANTO is the realization of a project that Alcorn had dreamed about for two decades, since she first visited Chile in 2003 to study the language and the music of the region. While there, she fell in love with the music while meeting and hearing first-hand the stories of activists, former exiles and concentration camp survivors.
She came to realize that many of the country’s songs were inextricably linked to its tragic history. “You would hear the nueva canción music everywhere,” she recalls. “It was an interesting time because the coup and dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet had left a giant wound in the Chilean psyche that has still not healed.”
Nueva canción is a hybrid and socially aware style of Latin American folk music. Popularized in the 1960s by luminaries such as Victor Jara and Violeta Parra (Chile), Mercedes Sosa (Argentina) and Silvio Rodriguez (Cuba), the genre was snuffed out in Chile by the Pinochet coup in 1973. Jara was brutally murdered by the police, folk instruments such as the quena and charango were banned, and many nueva canción artists in Chile spent decades in exile. It’s a music that abounds with sadness and tragedy, but that is always sung and played with an abundance of love and hope. The genre’s leading figures often worked in parallel with — and faced similar fates as — its frontline political activists. Along with Jara and the influential singer-songwriter Violeta Parra, Alcorn cites the prominence of bands like Illapu, Inti-Illimani, Los Jaivas and Quilapayùn. Throughout CANTO, Alcorn weaves the influence of nueva canción into a tapestry of explosive free improvisation, striking fragments of new music composition, rich jazz- and country-influenced harmonies, and the forlorn, gossamer power and elegance of the pedal steel. Though largely concerned with Chilean music and history, the album nonetheless addresses a range of universal themes with great tenderness and beauty.
The Septeto del Sur came together through the auspices of guitarist Luis “Toto” Alvarez, a veteran improviser who has worked with such international names as Lukas Ligeti, Tetuzi Akiyama, Kevin Shea and Christof Kurzmann, and founded the Acéfalo Records label and its affiliated festival. Bassist Amanda Irarrazabal is also an experienced improviser, having worked with such notables as Joëlle Léandre, Joe McPhee, Ben LaMar Gay and Brandon Lopez.
Drummer and cuatro player Claudio “Pajaro” Araya and charango and quena (Andean flute) player Francisco “Pancho” Araya are brothers from the north of Chile with deep roots in Chilean and Andean folk music. Pajaro, a founding member of the iconic band Huara, is much sought after in folk and Latin music circles, while Pancho is a modest yet esteemed master who has been a member of folkloric and contemporary groups including Huara and Illapu. Flutist and guitarist Rodrigo Bobadilla has worked with the late singer/songwriter Patricio Manns, a celebrated founder of Chile’s nueva canción movement. Like Bobadilla, violinist Danka Villanueva boasts extensive experience with artists from the realms of not only nueva canción, but also folk and rock.
“The band is a blend of experimentally inclined players and folk musicians,” Alcorn explains. “It's a mix of people and a mix of ideas; if the music works, maybe that's why.”
The mix works remarkably well, combining to craft music that is startling in its range and hybridity. Beginning with a slow milonga on Alcorn’s haunting pedal steel, “Suite Para Todos” slowly builds in force and tension as the other musicians add to the swooning, evocative melody. The mesmerizing spell is suddenly broken as the septet breaks apart into pointillistic improvisation, with Alcorn’s impressionistic instruction to imitate birdsong. Left alone again, Alcorn plays hushed, harp-like figures high on the neck of her guitar, ushering in an aggressive, near-martial pulse; the improvisation becomes violent and splintered before a shimmering finale, each musician interpreting Alcorn’s suggestion of a lone village woman raising the alarm before an encroaching military incursion amidst a Central American civil war.
The bulk of the album is taken up by Alcorn’s three-part suite “Canto.” The first section, “¿Dónde Están?,” takes its name from the phrase chanted throughout Latin America in response to the “disappeared,” the loved ones and fellow citizens who were swept away without a trace by Pinochet’s security forces. Alcorn’s pedal steel sings the folk melody over an insistent pulse that could be marching steps or a steely heartbeat. Stark improvisations lead into a dance-like section, undergirded by a gentler rendition of that pulsating beat.
The second section, “Presente: Sueño de Luna Azul,” is the album’s variegated centerpiece. “Presente” is another oft repeated chant, this one keeping alive the presence of those lost or missing. “Sueña de Luna Azul” is taken from the work of Mapuche (the indigenous people of south-central Chile and Argentina) poet Elicura Chihuailaf. While all of the pieces on the album wend through a wealth of moods, the nearly 13-minute piece is a particularly expansive journey, at one moment suggesting a Chilean variant on an Ennio Morricone spaghetti western score, at the next erupting into a chorus of shouts and grunts; a blistering segment summons the distorted intensity of doom metal, while another moment segues into a reharmonization of Olivier Messiaen’s “Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum.”
The ballad-like third section, “Lukax,” is dedicated to Chilean improviser and one-time political prisoner Lukax Santana. “Mercedes Sosa” is another dedication, this one to the late Argentine folk singer known as “La Negra.” Alcorn originally recorded the song on her first solo album, Uma, in 2000; here, the piece includes a dazzling example of Pajaro’s cuatro virtuosity. The album concludes with the impromptu recording of Victor Jara’s “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz,” featuring stirring vocals by Irarrazabal and ending this moving experience on an aptly galvanizing note of determined hope.
© Julia Walker
Susan Alcorn
One of the world’s premiere exponents of her instrument, Susan Alcorn has taken the pedal steel guitar far beyond its traditional role in country music. Having first paid her dues in Texas country & western bands, she began to expand the vocabulary of her instrument through her study of 20th century classical music, visionary jazz, and world musics. Though known for her solo work, she has collaborated with numerous artists including Pauline Oliveros, Eugene Chadbourne, Chris Cutler, the London Improvisors Orchestra, the Glasgow Improvisors Orchestra, Joe McPhee, Ken Vandermark, Nate Wooley, Ingrid Laubrock and Leila Bourdreuil, George Burt, Evan Parker, Caroline Kraabel, Michael Formanek, Catherine Sikora Mingus, Zane Campbell and Mary Halvorson among others. In 2017 she was a recipient of the Baker Artist Award and in 2018, along with saxophonist Joe McPhee, the Instant Award in Improvised Music. Her album Pedernal, was released to critical acclaim in 2020.
Susan Alcorn Septeto del Sur – CANTO
Relative Pitch – RPR 1170 – Recorded November 19-20, 2022
Release date November 10, 2023
