In some music circles the name of Susan Alcorn elicits excitement about the possibilities of the pedal steel guitar, as concerts where she is featured tend to bring the fascinatingly flexible and fluid sounds of that instrument to improvisational heights and textural wonders. On this recording, alongside Patrick Holmes on clarinet and Ryan Sawyer on drums, one can hear what exactly all the excitement is about.
The trio performs three tracks, "Benn," "Ñaar," "Ñett," through which the modulations of the music speak in the confines of the Union Pool in Brooklyn NY [a popular bar set in a former pool supply store presenting live music] to its responsive audience.
"Benn" takes off like an airplane into a rainstorm, soaring in sways and swirls above the clouds and back down again, turbulence expected and well navigated. Turbulence in musical thoughts is a mix of silences, noises, melodico-harmonic and percussive articulations of drums, pedal steel and clarinet.
"Ñaar," a second movement of sorts, serves as an elaboration and investigation, stones are turned and burrow holes of the imagination are looked into. Percussion in particular percolates in the introductory moments of this quarter-hour piece. The clarinet keens along in fluttering melismas, and the pedal steel swoops in with smudges of color and sheets of sound, stretching the shape of the piece to wider planes and geometric permutations of the intervals. A slipstreaming clarinet weaves in and out and around the evolving sonic mobiles that wax and wane.
In "Ñett," the final movement, the pedal steel articulates some guitar-istic figures, and barely a minute in, the trio are in the throes of a denouement that unravels over another quarter hour to bring the triptych to a logical and poetically achieved conclusion. Egging each other on, the improvisers pool the pieces of their thoughts, while exploring their own individual lines of logic, in collective improvisation that draws some spontaneous appreciative woops from the audience. That triggers a passage of vocal expression in the band, before the resumption of more lyrical and contrapuntal threads that go on for a while, after which the trio gets riled up in bursts of distortion and squiggles and blasts. A hovering chord emerges, bringing an energetic resolution to the evening of music.
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