“There’s just something about Baltimore that really grew on me,” Susan Alcorn told me in 2023.

The Ohio-born pedal steel guitarist was living in Texas in 2004 when she began performing in the city. She made appearances at local havens for improvised music like the Red Room and the High Zero Festival, crashing at festival co-founder John Berndt’s house. “I had met a lot of these great musicians and these goofballs from here,” she said. Within three years, Alcorn took a teaching job in Baltimore and made it her permanent home.

Alcorn, who died Jan. 31 at 71 years old, lived in historic Lauraville in Northeast Baltimore with her husband, photographer David Lobato, and their three cats. During her two decades here, Alcorn became an integral part of Baltimore’s experimental music scene and, increasingly, an internationally recognized pedal steel innovator who performed in over 20 countries. The New York Times named the Susan Alcorn Quintet’s “Pedernal” one of the best jazz albums of 2020. When the High Zero Foundation broke the news of Alcorn’s death Friday, experimental music luminaries like David Grubbs, Matmos’s Drew Daniel and Helado Negro posted fond memories and praised her talent.

I was blown away the first time I saw Alcorn in 2009 at a Charles Village venue called the Carriage House, where I heard her bend notes and summon eerie, surprising textures out of an instrument that conventionally plays a supporting role in country music. While many artists who make instrumental music prefer to let the music speak for itself, I found it refreshing that Alcorn spoke to the audience and offered some brief explanations of how the compositions she was playing were actually quite autobiographical.

I finally met Alcorn when I wrote about the 2023 High Zero Festival. By that time, she’d built up a formidable catalog of dozens of albums, and there was far more that I wanted to ask her than would possibly fit into my piece. For over an hour, we sat in the (now-shuttered) Red Canoe Café in Lauraville, discussing her long artistic journey over the last half century.

Alcorn learned her instrument the old-fashioned way, playing in country and western bands in Texas for over 20 years. “When I was in college, I started getting into country rock. I just liked the way it sounded, I liked the harmonies from the singers, and it just felt like fresh water or something ran over rocks in a stream,” she said. It was only once she’d learned all the rules that she started to break them, playing her first solo improvisational show in 1997 and releasing her first album, “Uma,” in 2000.

Though she’d often go onstage and improvise an entire set with other musicians, Alcorn remained interested in songcraft. “I like melodies, I like songs,” she said. Two of her best and most rigorously composed albums, “Pedernal” and 2023’s “Canto,” however, took a lot out of her. “Both of them, I’d wake up in the morning thinking, ‘Man, I have no ideas, I can’t think of anything.’ Somehow it comes together, but it’s kind of a — it’s a difficult process, at least for me.”

One of my favorite Alcorn melodies is “Northeast Rising Sun,” the closing track from “Pedernal.”

In liner notes, interviews, Facebook posts, and onstage statements, Alcorn always made her leftist political convictions clear. Last April, she performed at a benefit for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund at 2640 Space. And she often covered music associated with revolution and civil rights movements, whether the songs came from America or Chile’s political folk music genre, nueva cancion

A 7-minute deconstruction of the Impressions’ 1965 anthem “People Get Ready” that Alcorn arranged for 2003’s “Curandera” is one of the most moving pieces she ever recorded. The tenderness and detail with which Alcorn interpreted Curtis Mayfield’s melody is enough to communicate how strongly she believed in the song’s message.

I saw Alcorn live for the last time in March 2024 at Rhizome, a Washington, D.C., venue that’s really just a house in Takoma Park where performances are held in the living room. I was seated maybe eight feet away from Alcorn, close enough to hear her feet operate the pedals of her instrument. Her improvisations were as intriguing and unpredictable as they’d been the first time I saw her 15 years earlier.

When I talked to Alcorn in 2023, she mentioned several albums she’d recently recorded, some of which were released in 2024, like “Filament” with saxophonist Catherine Sikora. One project she mentioned that hasn’t yet surfaced is a collaboration with Philadelphia drummer Julius Masri that fuses death metal with free jazz, recorded live in a studio (“no audience, except for the cat”).

The idea of bringing different genres she loved into the realm of experimental improvisation excited her. “I think about doing that with country music as well.” So while there still may be some unheard Susan Alcorn recordings released in the future, sadly, she had a lot more music in her that we’ll never get to enjoy.