Dave Soldier has made music with elephants and bonobos, collaborated with Kurt Vonnegut, Sun Ra Arkestra saxophonist and de facto bandleader Marshall Allen, and long-dead multihyphenate Johannes Kepler, played with Bo Diddley and Velvet Underground cofounder John Cale, and spent decades treating the borders between classical, punk, blues, jazz, and experimental music as if they were merely suggestions.
Soldier, as David Sulzer, is also a neuroscientist and professor at Columbia University Medical Center, where he’s spent decades making significant contributions to the study of the brain.
And one of the stranger chapters in his musical life happened right here in Memphis, with John Cale, Michael Jackson, Billy Ray Cyrus, and Jerry Lee Lewis all playing supporting roles.
In October 1994, Soldier backed Cale on a deliberately stark, almost funereal rendition of “Heartbreak Hotel” at the Pyramid during Elvis: The Tribute Concert, a spectacularly overstuffed Elvis extravaganza watched by some 80 million television viewers.
Backstage, Michael Jackson swept through the green room, sending everyone, including Tony Bennett and Mavis Staples, scrambling to clear the way while Cale and Iggy Pop chatted casually in a corner. Then, when Jackson tried to make his getaway, his limo got a flat. As the credits rolled, Billy Ray Cyrus handed Soldier a toddler-aged Miley to hold. Priscilla Presley punctuated the bizarreness of the experience by giving Soldier, Aaron Neville, and Eddie Rabbitt a private tour of Graceland.
And then there was the Killer. “He was an older guy, but he looked mean,” Soldier recalls. “I didn’t wanna mess with him.”
Lewis’ performance was astonishing. “Scarier than any punk rocker,” Soldier says.
The concert itself was pure Hollywood. Afterward, Soldier went to the Castalia Heights juke joint Green’s Lounge, where he heard something closer to the Memphis music he’d been looking for.
That makes more sense when you know where Soldier comes from.
He was raised just upriver in Carbondale, Illinois, listening to Isaac Hayes and other Memphis music. Later in his youth, he joined Bo Diddley’s band in Gainesville, Florida. “It’s not foreign to me,” he says of R&B, soul, and the blues. “It’s part of the language I grew up with.”
Eventually that language found its way into The Kropotkins, the Memphis-centric band Soldier co-founded with New York no-wave composer and drummer Jonathan Kane. The band’s unlikely origins included a Japanese street band Soldier encountered in Stuttgart, Germany, playing Bill Monroe-style bluegrass, and a visit to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., where he discovered the music of North Mississippi hill country bandleader Sid Hemphill.
Hemphill’s instrumentation included banjo, bass drum, and snare.
“I wouldn’t have thought to put those instruments together,” Soldier says. “I thought the banjo wouldn’t work. I heard Hemphill and thought, wow, sure, it works beautifully.”
That’s his specialty: hearing a combination that shouldn’t work, then wondering why it wouldn’t.
Soldier met guitarist and singer Lorette Velvette through a chance introduction by Gary Hardy at Sun Studio. “I wanted someone who could understand those traditions while pushing them forward and backward at the same time into science fiction, West African music, Irish music, and whatever else might fit,” he says. “That was Lorette.”
He started working with her and The Kropotkins in the mid-’90s, and the band even made a pilgrimage to Otha Turner’s farm around then. For a time, Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker was in the group.
On October 2nd, Soldier returns to Memphis with another improbable collision: a performance with Velvette and keyboardist Alex Greene, both Kropotkins veterans; percussionist Ra-Kalam Bob Moses, who moved to Memphis in 2021; saxophonists Art Edmaiston and Chad Fowler; hill country blues guitarist Garry Burnside; harmonica player Yella P; tuba player Sean Murphy; Andre Turner’s fife and drum trio, the Otha Turner Boys; and Soldier on violin. Greene, who assembled the band with input from Soldier, played on an earlier interpretation of the LeWitt Etudes recorded in New York, released on Mahakala Music.
“One thing I’ve found is that if you get good musicians together from different backgrounds, everyone wants to make the best music they can,” Soldier says.
This is the thinking behind Soldier’s LeWitt Etudes, musical compositions inspired by conceptual artist Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings. LeWitt supplied instructions for drawings that could be realized in innumerable ways, depending on the artists carrying them out.
Soldier has applied the concept to music. His LeWitt Etudes are designed for musicians from any tradition and any level of training, including none. There are no notes to read. The musicians get the instructions and figure out what happens next.
“Whether they’re improvisers or non-improvisers, composers or non-composers, they become improvisers and composers,” he says.
Soldier doesn’t particularly like the word “experimental.” What he wants is for musicians to surprise one another.
“Derail, of course,” he says when asked whether he wants collaborators to stick to his plan. “The point of collaboration is … other people would do what you wouldn’t have done or even thought of.”
For Memphis, he wants “some of the sounds I associate with the North Mississippi hill country and Memphis and Chicago blues, which came out of Memphis anyways.”
Soldier also objects to the word “weird,” an adjective I borrowed from the storied music critic Greil Marcus.
“We could talk about them being ‘weird’ or being ‘sui generis,’” he says of North Mississippi blues masters R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough. “‘Weird’ is just a nervous way to describe something brilliant and unique.”
Fair enough. That may be the best way to approach Soldier’s music, too. He gives musicians a framework, gets out of the way, and sees what they do with it.
After all, as Soldier puts it, musicians are like songbirds.
“The same way that if you’re a bird, you just sing,” he says. “That’s your job.”
Dave Soldier and ensemble will perform selections from The LeWitt Etudes: Memphis at the Green Room at Crosstown Arts at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, October 2nd.
