Performers:
Lorette Velvette (vocals, guitar)
Charlie Burnham (violin)
Dave Soldier (banjo, violin)
Dog (guitar, bass)
Samm Bennett (bass drum & percussion, vocals)
Jonathan Kane (snare drum)
Alex Greene (keyboards)
with
Doug Easley, bass
with BJ Cole, pedal steel guitar
Ron Franklin, fife
They Are There (Charles Ives)
Beulah Land (Burnham)
My Body Lies on the Mountain (Soldier)
Wandering on This Earth (Velvette)
If I Had My Way (Burnham)
Found You in My House (Soldier)
Biloxi (Soldier)
Little Drag Racer (Soldier)
The Yankee Rag (Greene)
Soon As the Rain Lets Up (Bennett)
Bringabye (Bennett)
Grateful Wanderer (Bennett)
Five Points Crawl
2000
Mulatta Records
Performers: Lorette Velvette (vocals, guitar)
Charlie Burnham (violin)
Dave Soldier (banjo, violin)
Dog (guitar, bass)
Maureen "Mo" Tucker (bass drum, vocals)
Jonathan Kane (snare drum)
Tunes: Crazy Hannah (Mo Tucker)
Starkweather (James Tucker (Mo's Brother), lyrics, Dave Soldier music)
Truckstop Girls (Soldier)
I Gotta Man (Charlie Burnham)
Drivin' to Spring (Soldier)
Justice Down South (Soldier)
Seconds Past Midnight (Velvette & Soldier)
Sissy Wa Wa (Velvette, Soldier, Rory Young)
Junior's Groove (Vevette)
Forever Motel (lyrics James Tucker, music Soldier)
The Kropotkins 1995
Performers:
Lorette Velvette (vocals, guitar)
Mark Feldman (violin), Dave Soldier
(banjo, violin)
Dog (guitar, bass), Samm Bennett (bass drum, vocals)
Jonathan Kane (snare drum)
Koch Records, out of print, some copies still available
from Mulatta Records: will be re-released
Tunes: Cold Wet Steel (Soldier)
Shake 'Em on Down Fred (McDowell)
Everdream (Soldier/Rory Young)
On This Earth (Soldier)
Pachman Farm (Bukka White)
Something Crawling Round My Bed (Velevette)
Good Cheap Transportation (Bennett)
Coal Black Wind (Soldier)
Some of the Dust (Bennett)
The Nasadiya (Soldier)
Crow Jane (Soldier, based on anonymous song)
from
left: Lorette Velvette, Jonathan Kane, Dave Soldier, Mo Tucker
("Maureen Tucker"), Dog (Mark Deffenbaugh), Charlie Burnham, photo by
Ron Gott in NYC (2000)
Kropotkins in November 16,
2009 at Poisson Rouge, NYC
Alex Greene, Jonathan Kane, Ron Franklin, Dog, Lorette Velvette,
Charlie Burnham, Dave Soldier, photos by Sarah Greene
Alex, Jonathan, Ron Franklin, Dog, Lorette
Ron, Dog, Lorette, Charlie hidden, Dave
Ron, Dog, Lorette, Charlie hidden, Dave
Kropotkins with Othar
Turner and his family in Como, Mississippi in 2000
Dave, Maureen, Othar, Dog
Othar Turner and Maureen Tucker - two greats of American rhythms
Lorette Velvette
(Hellcats, Tav Falco, recorded w. Sonic Youth, Jessie Mae Hemphill)
vocals, guitar Charlie Burnham (Cassandra Wilson, James
Blood Ulmer, Henry Threadgill), violin Dave Soldier (Thai Elephant Orchestra,
Soldier String Quartet, John Cale, Bo Diddley), banjo & violin Dog (Mark Deffenbaugh) (John Cale, Souxie
& the Banshees), guitar Alex Greene (Iggy Pop, Jim Dickinson,
Reigning Sound), keyboards Jonathan Kane (February, Rhys Chatham,
LaMonte Young, Swans), snare drum Ron Franklin, jack of all trades
Nearly eveyrone writes some of the music. On the new CD, there is one
"cover", by Charles Ives
on Paradise Square, we
are joined by Doug Easley, (Sonic Youth, Jeff Buckley,
Cat Power, White Stripes), bass Samm Bennett, (John Zorn, Elliott Sharp,
SKIST), percussion BJ Cole, (John Cale, Elton John, Luke
Vibert), pedal steel
The
Kropotkins were founded by Jonathan Kane and Dave Soldier in 1994 after
they heard Mississippi fife and drum music and flipped out on it. We
asked was what would rock n' roll sound like if it went down those
rural routes? Othar Turner and Sid Hemphill showed you could mix the
bass and snare drum with the banjo, fiddle, and guitar and vocals.
Everything can be played without electonics at a barbeque.
In
detail, in 1992 I was on a tour with John Cale and Bob Neuwirth with
John on Bosendorfer piano, the Soldier String Quartet and the British
pedal steel player BJ Cole, singers Tiye' Giraud and Sam Butler. We
traveled in two enormous tour buses full of equipment and required many
hours a day to set up. One day waiting for soundcheck in Stuttgart I
heard a Japanese bluegrass band playing Bill Monroe on the street. It
took a minute for them to set up and they could play anywhere. Monroe's
music was transcendent, many years after he created it and in a foreign
country played by unexpected musicians.
Bill
Monroe's music, along with Howlin' Wolf, hearing unreleased north
Mississippi tapes by Alan Lomax at the Smithsonian, and cassettes of
Junior Kimbrough, RL Burnside and Othar Turner that the writer Robert
Palmer had given me, inspired the Kropotkins.
I
called up my favorite musician for each part. Locating Lorette Velvette
was an adventure, the only player in the group I didn't really know and
had only met once when she opened for Othar Turner in 1992 at the Bank
on Houston Street - I thought I was hallucinating. I tracked her down
in Memphis when the Cale and my String Quartet group performed at the
25th anniversary of Elvis's death. From the Cale entourage, we invited
the great Mo Tucker to play. And my favorite violinists, Charlie
Burnham and Mark Feldman, and favorite slide guitarist, Dog (Mark
Deffenbaugh) as well as percussionist Samm Bennett. Mo Tucker performed
with us 1998-2002, and wrote some great material on Truckstop Girls.
It's
a great group, we have a great time playing, but farming for Alex and
Lorette, as well as work and families keep us from performing as much
as we'd like. Also, Alex, Lorette, and Ron live in Memphis, and
Charlie, Dog, Dave, and Jonathan in New York.
We've
played memorable concerts at the Bottom Line, Knitting Factory, Tonic,
Joe's Pub, Poisson Rouge, Issue Project Room and the Blues in Roots
Festival in the mountains of British Columbia.
Videos
(blue ones from Poisson Rouge, December, 2009, light ones from Issue
Project Room, February, 2010) - there are more on YouTube.
The
New Yorker:
"OFF THE WALL. It takes a lot of guts (and a lot of brains) to try to
imbue northern Mississippi fife-and-drum music with an anarchic spirit.
The composer Dave Soldier, a neuroscientist, and the drummer Jonathan
Kane, a downtown no-wave legend, perform as the Kropotkins, with an
assist from, among others, the fine Mepmphis-based singer Lorette
Velvette." (pick of the week, Feb 8, 2010)
"In 1994, inspired by the fife-and-drum blues of northern Mississippi
and the bluegrass inventor Bill Monroe, the iconclastic downtown
composer and scientist Dave Soldier (he's a professor of neurology at
Columbia) fromed the Kropotkins, named after the Russian anarchist
Peter Kropotkin. While the group is conentional by the standards of
some of Soldier's other projects (he once created enroumous instruments
for a group of Thai elephants to play), it can nonetheless seamlessly
weave a Charles Ives cover into a set of soulful, if sometimes angular,
country- or blues-tinged originals. Besides Soldier, who plays violin
and banjo, the sextet includes the co-founder Jonathan Kane on snare
drum, the Memphis-based singer Lorette Velvette, and the sweet-toned
violinist and singer Charlie Burnham. For this performance they'll be
celebrating the rlease of "Paradise Square", an engaging collection of
new songs named for a vanished nineteenth-century park in lower
Manhattan." (pick of the week, Feb 8, 2010)
"postmodern pre-blues" (R. Christgau, Village Voice)
Village
Voice:
"Kropotkins left decorous in the dust. Nothing with drummer Mo Tucker,
the thundergoddess behind the Velvet Underground, could be described as
decorous. Soldier's banjo suggests that the high lonesome sound is an
overtone series generated by the open strings of the Delta bottom.
Kropotkins find common ground between the non-Western tunings and
African beats of the old blues and the barbaric harmonies of early
minimalism. Velvette wows with an iron determination to get through at
all costs. Reality TV? This is reality music, man, and we need more of
it." - David Krasnow, 2001
Entertainment Weekly:
"New York avant-gardist David Soldier and a cadre of experimentalists
take apart the Mississippi Delta Blues and reassemble them into a
jagged, slightly nightmarish soundscape. The core instruments are
fiddle, banjo, and drums (plus Lorette Velvette's flat-affect vocals).
You would expect so self-consciously arty an enterprise to reek of
pretensiousness; instead, The Kropotkins is funky and
listenable."
Time
Out:
"Any self-respecting fan of downtown music could tell you that a
project involving drummer Jonathan Kane, multi-instrumentalist David
Soldier and violinist Charlie Burnham is bound to be both intensely
eclectic and a whole lot of fun. Formed in the early '90s and
recently
resurrected, the Kropotkins purvey a wild, fantastical blend that draws
equally on postmodern Tom Waits-ian clatter and Mississippi
fife-and-drum music." (February, 2010)
East Bay Express:
"The Kropotkins could be considered an alt-rock/underground supergroup:
it's made up of Lorette Velvette (the Hellcats, Tav Falco's Panther
Burns); avant-classical violinist Dave Soldier (the Soldier String
Quartet, Elliott Sharp, John Cale); Moe Tucker (Velvet Underground);
Jonathan Kane (Swans); jazz violinist Charlie Burnham (James Blood
Ulmer, Ronald Shannon Jackson); and guitarist Dog (drummer/composer
Samm Bennett). The Kropotkins use the vocabulary of Delta blues, old
Southern backcountry fife-&-drum music, and raw rock 'n'
roll, which ends up sounding something like a skiffle group from hell
or Leatherface's back-porch string band. Scratchy fiddle, yowling
electric slide guitar, drums that alternately sound martial then
harmolodic à la Ornette Coleman, percussion coming over the
shortwave
from Jamaica and West Africa, and the deadpan stray-cat vocals of Ms.
Velette lead you through areas of New York and the rural South that
you'll never see on a tourism commercial. The '77-era Mekons-like
"Seconds Past Midnight" seems to chronicle the last hours (or an S/M
session) of some schnook ("they brushed his hair and beat him tenderly/
that fool thought death didn't know his name"), and the stark, swampy,
slithering blues that is "Junior's Groove" might make R.L. Burnside
join the priesthood. Their music doesn't merely draw upon the blues
tradition for its mojo -- it draws upon the African roots of the blues,
without ever coming off as wannabe ethnomusicologists."
AllMusic:
A stunning follow-up to their self-titled debut, the
Kropotkins'
Five Points Crawl probes the subconscious of a parallel American
landscape littered with truck stops and roadside motels. Their unique
sound mixes the instrumentation of an American Revolutionary militia
band (fife, field drum, banjo, violin) fused with a punk-inspired and
historical sense of the Mississippi Delta blues. An eclectic mix of
veteran musicians and accomplished songwriters (Dave Soldier,
Charlie Burnham, Dog)
create an atmosphere of twang and trash while the extraordinary and
subtle Memphis singer Lorette
Velvette
drawls out surreal and sultry vocals, backed up by the driving rhythmic
energy of Moe Tucker and Johnathan Kane. Highly recommended. " -Zach
Layton
Tiny
Mix Tapes:
"the music is always pretext. Pretext for Lorette Velvette and Samm
Bennett, whose vocals, sung with tender or ironic tones, outline scenes
from outdated places and times, sketching the timeless failings of
their fellow man, taking part in the constitution and perpetuation of a
specific idea in the American myth."
Bio for Programs
The
Kropotkins
were founded by drummer Jonathan Kane and violinist/ banjo player Dave
Soldier in NYC in 1992 after they heard Mississippi fife and drum music
and flipped out. We asked was what would rock n' roll sound like if it
went down those rural routes? Sid Hemphill showed you could mix the
bass and snare drum with the banjo, fiddle, and guitar and vocals.
Everything can be played without electonics at a barbeque. We asked our
favorite musicians on their respective instruments, singer Lorette
Velvette from Memphis, violinist Charlie Burnham, guitarist Dog (Mark
Deffenbaugh), and drummer Alex Greene, also from Memphis. It's
a great group, we have a great time playing, but farming for Alex and
Lorette, as well as distance, work and families keep us from performing
as much as we'd like. Over nearly 20 years, we have had
three CDs, the newest called Paradise Square (Mulatta Records), and we
hope to record some new music next year in New Orleans.
The Kropotkins 
