Alive in the Root – Band bios

Jessie Kessler has always been a talented painter and musician. Having written songs nearly all her life, her primary outlet for music was playing for friends in person and on social media, where she routinely got an overwhelmingly positive response. With 300+ songs currently sloppily amassed in a disintegrating 3-ring binder, the integrity of which must be addressed soon if she does not wish to be further harassed by her bandmates, she has honed her songwriting craft, and composes nearly daily. With her husband Chris, Jessie has been raising two daughters, and is currently in grad school, but in 2018 finally found the time to release her songs into the wild.  The wilderness included a recreational group with Chris called Double Date, then later The Lost Tribe of Modern Folk, and finally Alive in the Root. Having an outlet for her material has been a dream of hers, and now a dream for her fans and bandmates.

Dan Broder started out playing the violin at age 6, but quit at age 12 when he became suffocated by his Eastern European teacher, a taskmaster who threatened to hit him with his bow on more than one occasion. He quickly started learning guitar and never looked back. After a stint in some questionable bands in Northern California he reached Champaign, Illinois, where he met members of what is now The Yonder Mountain String Band, and became part of their pre-Yonder outfit “The Bluegrassholes.”  He later formed another band called Waffle Hoss, which featured banjoist Noam Pikelny, currently with The Punch Brothers and Mighty Poplar. Returning to California he landed in San Diego, where he played with several bluegrass/rock/alt-country groups, but after the scourge of sunny and beautiful weather every single day, Dan moved to Maine and found himself playing with Jessie Kessler, singer and songwriter extraordinaire, and a fire was lit. They first formed The Lost Tribe of Modern Folk with singer/guitar player Pat Coon, and LTMF won the MAMM Slam band competition right before COVID hit. As things started to settle, Dan recruited his buddy Leonard Commet Krill to help round out the sound, and this ultimately led to the formation of Alive in the Root.

Leonard Commet Krill began his music career as a pretty good trombone player, then a so-so trumpet player in a drum and bugle corps in Spokane, Washington (“The Percussion-Nauts”!), then as a proud holder of the Boy Scout merit badge for bugle with a real bugle, then as an OK cocktail piano player, then as a bad guitar player, and finally found his musical home in Maine as a journeyman upright bass player. For the past dozen years he’s been gigging around southern Maine with the Common House Band, The Mutineers, Blasted Knoll String Band, and Lost Tribe of Modern Folk. Until joining Alive in the Root, his favorite musical endeavor was dressing up with his college girlfriend as Victorian street urchins and busking flute/recorder Christmas carols at Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco. He gave up the recorder and the costume but has been the piano accompanist for the Two Echo Community Carol Sing for the past 20 years. 

Sam Mitchell is a guitar ninja who travels only by night and shares neither his bio nor history nor his bona fides with anyone. Those ninjas, shy you know. We think he’s been on several highly-regarded CDs and a couple of slick videos from his musical years in Asheville NC, has been in lots of Maine bands, and hasn’t been thrown out of any of them. We do know for certain, however, that Sam is currently a key member of ALWAYS, sometimes, and that we are lucky they share him with us. If we show up for a gig without him, that means he’s hanging with them. He’s also very funny.