Performers:
Lorette Velvette vocals, guitar
Charlie Burnham vocals, violin, mandocello, mandolin,
guitar, harmonica
Dave Soldier vocals, banjo, violin, guitar, piano
Dog (Mark Deffenbaugh) guitar, bass, fife
Alex Greene piano, bass, piano, organ, bass drum
Jonathan Kane snare drum, drums, bongos
Rory Young synthesizer, recorder
Tunes:
1. The Moon’s Already Down (Dave Soldier)
2. Fred Goes Out at Night (Vince Bell, Fred McDowell,
Soldier, Velvette)
3. On the Wall (Louise Johnson)
4. The Stars of Country Music Greet the Spring (Dave
Soldier)
5. No Good Lover (Mickey & Sylvia)
6. Cricket Blues (Dave Soldier)
7. Clara (Dubose Heyward & George Gershwin)
8. Stoney Lonesome (Bill Monroe)
9. Whippoorwill Blues (Dave Soldier)
10. This Land is Your Land (Woody Guthrie)
11. Scriptures (Charley Burnham)
12. Deep Water (Alex Greene & Lorette Velvette)
13. Pale Wildwood Flower (Joseph Philbrick Webster)
Paradise Square 2009
Mulatta Records
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 
