Susan Alcorn's "Canto"

The pedal steel guitar's molten silver lilt has long been associated with the sentimental side of country music, or provided a horn-like voice in western swing's jazz-with-cowboy-hats. In this century, though, under the hands of players like sax titan Peter Brotzmann's longtime duet partner Heather Leigh and Baltimore-based Susan Alcorn (whose new album we shall consider today), it's occupied other sonic spaces. 

Alcorn's musical odyssey has been circuitous and multifaceted. Taking up pedal steel in the late '70s, she paid her dues in Chicago country bands before moving to Houston, where she made her mark on a highly competitive country/western swing scene, while studying jazz improvisation and essaying her own dissonant compositions, influenced by 20th century classical music. A 1990 encounter with the composer and musical thinker Pauline Oliveros and her ideas of Deep Listening was an important influence on Alcorn's developing concept. 

A 1997 invitation from trombonist/Nameless Sound founder Dave Dove inspired Alcorn to attempt freely improvised solo performance, which became her main focus. (Dove played on her first album, 2000's Uma, which was engineered by Tom Carter of Charalambides fame, another regular collaborator.) She's also performed with improvisers of the caliber of Eugene Chadbourne, Peter Kowald, and Joe McPhee. The Argentine tango composer Astor Piazzolla is another key influence; Alcorn recorded an album of his works for Relative Pitch in 2015. 

I first heard Alcorn as a side musician on guitarist Mary Halvorson's Away With You (2016) and bassist Max Johnson's In the West (2017). (Halvorson returned the favor with her appearance of Alcorn's 2020 quintet album Pedernal.) More recently, Alcorn made an incandescent appearance on this year's Manifesto, an improv trio with saxophonist Jose Lencastre and bassist Hernani Faustino. But I'd never heard any of her compositions until her new album, Canto -- out November 10 on Relative Pitch -- came my way. 

Since relocating to Baltimore in 2007, Alcorn has been a regular visitor to Europe and South America. She first visited Chile even earlier, in 2003, and that country's folk and nueva cancion musics are the foundation on which Canto is built. The socially conscious nueva cancion style was outlawed and brutally targeted during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), with instruments banned and performers murdered or driven into exile. 

The material on Canto pays tribute to the victims of Pinochet's regime. In theme and spirit, the album recalls Charlie Haden's The Ballad of the Fallen, with his Liberation Music Orchestra. But Canto is both more authentically folkloric and boldly improvisational than its precursor -- a reflection of the musicians Alcorn recruited for her Septeto del Sur. Guitarist Luis "Toto" Alvarez and bassist Amanda Irrazabal are veteran improvisers. Brothers Claudio "Pajaro" Araya (who plays drums and cuatro -- a small guitar) and Francisco "Pancho" Araya (who plays charango -- a small lute -- and quena, or Andean flute) are folk musicians from northern Chile. Flutist/guitarist Rodrigo Bobadilla and violinist Danka Villanueva have worked extensively within the nueva cancion idiom. 

The opening "Suite Para Todos" alternates languorous melody with episodes of improvisation that first evoke birdsong, then cries of alarm before a military attack. The heart of the matter here is Alcorn's tripartite "Canto" suite. The first part, "Donde Estan?," laments the fate of the opponents of Pinochet -- up to 30,000 in all -- who were "disappeared" by the dictator's security forces. A gentle folk melody contrasts with a martial pulse that could represent the forces of repression or the heartbeats of their victims. The second, "Presente: Sueno de Luna Azul," is a 13-minute piece, cinematic in its scope, that draws inspiration from both the work of indigenous Mapuche poet Elicura Chihuailaf and Olivier Messiaen's "Et Expecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum" (which Alcorn previously referred to on her album And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar).

The suite's third section, "Lukax," dedicated to the improviser and former political prisoner Lukax Santana, is a ballad which gives way to episodes of turbulent improvisation. Alcorn and the Septeto del Sur also dust off her composition "Mercedes Sosa," dedicated to the late Argentine folksinger and previously recorded on Alcorn's debut album. The album closes with a version of the murdered activist-singer Victor Jara's "El Derecho de Vivir en Paz," sung by bassist Irrazabal and sounding a note of hope after great pain and sorrow. A worthwhile listen for a moment when freedom remains at hazard throughout our troubled world.

Things we like: Lisa Cameron and Ernesto Diaz-Infante

The Austin-based percussionist and multi-instrumentalist Lisa Cameron has deep roots in improvised music and psychedelia, having drummed with Denton avant-polka outfit Brave Combo (a new project with founder Carl Finch is in the works), Texas psych originator Roky Erickson, and ATX space-rock juggernaut ST 37, and she gets around. Just a  couple of weeks after I saw Cameron play a set of stunningly telepathic free improv with Damon Smith, Alex Cunningham, and Sarah Ruth Alexander at Fort Worth's Grackle Art Gallery earlier this year, a buddy in NYC saw her kicking the traps with ST 37 when they opened for Acid Mothers Temple there. 

A fellow traveler of Cameron's since 2012 is the prolific Bay Area Chicano composer-guitarist Ernesto Diaz-Infante. Their collaboration was first captured on Sol et Terra (2013), a hypnotic confluence of echolalic stream of consciousness and tribal thump -- some of which was used in the soundtrack for Marjorie Sturm's documentary film The Cult of JT Leroy -- first released on writer-poet Bill Shute's Kendra Steiner Editions in 2015. Psychedelic music generally comes in one of two flavors: that which attempts to replicate the psychedelic experience, or that which is produced by people experiencing expanded states of consciousness. While I can't attest to the state of mind Cameron and Diaz-Infante were in while performing this music, Sol et Terra's flow has the same meditative and ritual quality one associates with mind expansion.

The music on Water is Life -- recorded in the summer of 2016 -- is informed and inspired by the protests, then ongoing, against the Dakota Access Pipeline by the Standing Rock Sioux, who recognized the pipeline's construction as a threat to their region's water supply, as well as ancient burial grounds and cultural sites. Instrumentation for the four-hour session was minimal, with Cameron using only percussion, contact mics, and a lap steel, while Diaz-Infante played an electric guitar straight through the amp with no effects. Despite the use of amplification, the resultant music has a primordial, dawn-of-time sound, with Diaz-Infante reminding us that the guitar is also a percussion instrument. As the music unfolds, quietly but relentlessly, one hears a summons to action ("Watery Water"), a lament for the Earth (after clashes with militarized police -- impressionistically depicted by welters of slide-driven harmonics in "Standoff at Blackwater Bridge" -- and courtroom battles, the pipeline remains in operation), and a statement of ongoing determination (the closing "The Twilight of Capitalism"). 

More recently, I discovered that Cameron and I share an enthusiasm for Jefferson Airplane's third LP, After Bathing At Baxter's. I dig the ragged counterpoint of the Airplane's three-way vocal blend, the song structures still surprise me after 50+ years of listening, Kantner's 12-string is jazzy like McGuinn's, and Jack Casady's bass is my favorite instrumental noise from the whole San Fran development. Come to find out that Diaz-Infante's home studio is located next door to the legendary house where the Airplane resided during their '60s heyday. 

You can detect some emanations from that spirit on Ghosts of the JA, recorded in Diaz-Infante's studio in 2019 and released earlier this year on San Antonio-based Loma Editions. (A guy I worked with at Record Town in Dobie Mall on the UT campus back in '79 reported similar resonance from a house he lived in that Roky Erickson formerly occupied.) The song titles here are packed with allusions to the Airplane's Baxter's, Surrealistic Pillow, and Volunteers albums, and the sound has the full-on lysergic rush that was always seeping out of the interstices in the Airplane's best music. Replete with echo, delay, and snatches of feedback, the overall effect of Ghosts of the JA is dreamlike, haunting, and a little sinister. All three of the collaborations between these two musicians attest to the evocative power of spontaneous composition. 

Things we like: Ingebrigt Haker Flaten, Nick Didkovsky

When Ernesto Montiel told me, back in mid-2022, that the Scandinavian quintet Atomic was making an appearance on its farewell tour at the Texas Theatre, my initial response was "Who?" Shame on me. Atomic was the band Norwegian bassist extraordinaire Ingebrigt Haker Flaten formed with his college mates Pal Nilssen-Love and Havard Wiik, joining up with the estimable Swedes Magnus Broo and Fredrik Ljungquist. I knew Ingebrigt primarily as a member of The Thing -- a free-jazz trio with a rock aesthetic (Stooges and Suicide covers on an album with disco chanteuse Nene Cherry!) -- and his collabs with Oak Cliff's Gonzalez family (The Hymn Project with trumpeter-dad Dennis; the jazz/metal/hip-hop hybrid The Young Mothers with drummer/vibist Stefan and a passel of Texas worthies). Recently I caught Ingebrigt in a trio with Stefan and multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee, and was able to score some CDs from his merch bag that filled some gaps in my knowledge.

Element is the self-titled 1996 debut from a quartet that was Ingebrigt's first band with Nilssen-Love and Wiik, a modal/free-bop vehicle for saxophonist Gisle Johansen. At this point, the musicians were still forging their identities, although drummer Nilssen-Love already had the hallmarks of the irrepressible force of nature he'd be in The Thing, Peter Brotzmann's Hairybones, and elsewhere. Close Erase's Dance This, from 2001, is Something Entahrly Other: a keyboard-bass-drums trio with Ingebrigt on very funky electric bass. The grooves Haker Flaten lays down with keyboardist Kristian Wallumrod and drummer Per Oddvar Johansen touch on both early electric Miles (the Corea-Holland-Dejohnette lineup) and hip-hop (the electronic percussion tracks). A good soundtrack for dancing in your head. 

A couple of Bandcamp Fridays ago, I belatedly picked up on the 2021 self-titled release from (Exit) Knarr, an octet that's a vehicle for Ingebrigt's compositions. The album is the recording of a commissioned autobiographical suite paying tribute to six locations that have been pivotal in the composer's life: from his childhood home in Oppdal, through his formative years in Trondheim, his American homes in Chicago and Austin, and excursions to Mexico City and Amsterdam. The music is rhythmically robust and melodically rich, with instrumentation that boasts three horns (including the fiery altoist Mette Rasmussen and the excellent Atle Nymo on clarinets and tenor), two drummers (and eight handclappers!), electric guitar, and Oscar Gronberg covering both grand piano and electronic keys. Particularly noteworthy are the opening blast of "Miles Ave.," the gorgeous romanticism of "Hakkaran," and the lyrically arcing, yearning "Museumplein," but the whole album stands up to repeated spins. Sounds like a masterpiece to me. 

More recently, Ingebrigt anchored Harvesters, the latest offering from the Rempis Percussion Quartet. Dave Rempis is a Chicago-based saxophonist/composer, a familiar of Ken Vandermark and Mars Williams, and the quartet features him in harness with percussionists Tim Daisy and Frank Rosaly, both of whom are also his regular duet partners. (Rosaly also drums with Ingebrigt in The Young Mothers.) The drummers' dynamic range runs the gamut from mice toes scampering to twin volcanoes erupting a la Elvin and Rashied on Trane's Meditations. Ingebrigt proves himself to be a nonpareil listening improviser, backing Rempis to the hilt from alpha to omega. 

My buddy, guitarist/composer Nick Didkovsky, recently visited Texas from NYC, but we didn't get around to much shoptalk while he was here, so I had to discover via socials that he has a couple of new projects, as well as an upcoming performance of Alice Cooper's Killer album (that's October 26 at Arlene's Grocery in NYC). Seagull Brain is the first-time collaboration between Nick and his fellow guitarists Mark Howell (Timber, Zero Pop) and Chris Cochrane (No Safety, Collapsible Shoulder). The agreeable collision between their dark, harmonic-rich tones and timbres, dueling rhythmic thrusts, and exploratory melodies makes for a mighty satisfying listen, especially for fans of rock-based atonal skree (think Fred Frith, Henry Kaiser, Bill Orcutt, even Beefheart). (CDs available here.)

Also Bandcamp-available are five demos from a guitar duo with Sean Walsh (from the band Skullshitter); a full-length release is planned for next year. These serene miniatures might come as a surprise to listeners familiar with Nick's bands Doctor Nerve and Vomit Fist, or his ongoing CHORD guitar duo with Tom Marsan. In spirit, if not letter, the music puts me in mind of the duets John Abercrombie recorded with Ralph Towner back in the '70s. A tantalizing preview of things to come, and you can name your own price.