from Baltimore
Susan Alcorn
SUSAN ALCORN pedal steel guitar
Composer, improviser, pedal steel guitarist SUSAN ALCORN came up playing country and western music, but her ear eventually led her down a decidedly more singular experimental path. “You’ve got to be naked in your mind to be able to play and express yourself… naked and fearless and that’s not easy.”
Having started out playing guitar at the age of twelve, she quickly immersed herself in folk music, blues, and the pop music of the 1960s. A chance encounter with blues musician Muddy Waters steered her towards playing slide guitar. By the time she was twenty-one, she had immersed herself in the pedal steel guitar, playing in country and western swing bands in Texas.
Soon, she began to combine the techniques of country-western pedal steel with her own extended techniques to form a personal style influenced by free jazz, avant-garde classical music, Indian ragas, Indigenous traditions, and various folk musics of the world. By the early 1990s her music began to show an influence of the holistic and feminist “deep listening” philosophies of Pauline Oliveros.
Although Susan Alcorn typically plays solo, she has collaborated in performance with electronic composer Pauline Oliveros, German bassist Peter Kowald, multi-instrumentalist Eugene Chadbourne, British saxophonist Evan Parker, Brooklyn guitarist Mary Halvorson, among many other greats.
from Hamilton
LEE/PALMER/BENNETT
DAVID LEE double bass CHRIS PALMER guitar CONNOR BENNETT reeds
With its “chamber jazz” lineup of tenor & soprano saxophone (Connor Bennett), electric guitar (Chris Palmer) and double bass (David Lee), the exciting new trio, LEE/PALMER/BENNETT, has made a special niche for itself in Hamilton’s expanding new music scene. Radical New Zealand guitarist Palmer, saxophonist Bennett (known for his work in Haolin Munk and Eschaton) and bassist David Lee (veteran of such groups as Eric Stach, the Artists Jazz Band, and the Bill Smith Ensemble) take a variety of new approaches to planning and devising an especially focused and mature style of group improvisation. Acoustic music with electric intensity!
DAVID LEE is a writer and double bassist. Originally from BC, he spent years in the Toronto music and art scene, playing bass and cello in a variety of settings, then moving to BC’s Sunshine Coast in the 1980s, and currently lives in Hamilton. The author of books on jazz and other subjects (winner of the 2007 Hamilton Literary Award for non-fiction for Chainsaws: A History), currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of Guelph, David sits on the curriculum committee of Guelph’s International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. In 1996, while living in Pender Harbour, BC, he was part of the founding committee that launched the successful Pender Harbour Jazz Festival. In 2012 Tightrope Books of Toronto published David’s first novel, Commander Zero. Wolsak & Wynn recently published a newly revised edition of David’s critically-acclaimed jazz book The Battle of the Five Spot: Ornette Coleman and the New York Jazz Field. More recently, the Cthulhu mythos was brought to the mean streets of modern-day Hamilton with David’s young adult novel, The Midnight Games.
from Toronto
BELLWETHER4
EMILY DENISON trumpet ANTHONY ARGATOFF alto saxophone ANDREW MILLER percussion VICTOR VRANKULJ bass
This Toronto based quartet is dedicated to creating a unique voice through original compositions focusing on improvised/avant-garde music influenced by Ornette Coleman and Anthony Braxton among many others.
