Carney's Little Carnival Pink Section featured article 5/30/04

-- Joe Jarrell
S.F. Chronicle

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"...supreme hipsters know that this sweet guy with the muttonchop sideburns and fine Hawaiian shirts is the king of the new wave horn."
-- Ann Powers
S.F. Weekly

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"Ralph Carney's Circle of Fifths continuously evolves in horns' circular breathing (like Australian Aborigines' Didgerey Doo) matching voice-text power to make the most perfect poetry music recording I've done."
--Allen Ginsberg

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"Ralph's great... He's guided by some other source of information. He's like a broken toy that works better than before it was broken."
--Tom Waits

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"...the theater's crackly speakers began pouring out a saxophone overture so strange and outrageously operatic that I immediately sat up in my seat. The song, Temptation, was by Tom Waits. But the sax work belonged to Ralph Carney, who is to music, what Jim Carrey is to comedy: mind bendingly wacky, unpredictable and ingenious"
--Mark Wasserman
click here for more of this review

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"That practice of layering and playing off of himself informs his third solo record. The leaps between songs or inside of them is twisted indeed. "Jug Gland Music" is Carney as an entire jug band, playing banjo, jug, sax, clarinet, washboard, and spoons, cooking down the Hot Sevens and Fives of Louis Armstrong."
--Andy Beta
click here for more of this review

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"Carney is an unabashed kitchen sink instrumentalist. And, on 'This Is!', he plays all the instruments, catalogued meticulously in the liner notes ...The whole album fairly reeks of top-grade demented Americana -- a combination of Brian Wilson's Smile-era Dixieland freakouts, Waits's sideshow laments, and the raggedly radical Lower East Side jugbandery of the Holy Modal Rounders.
-- Jesse Jarnow click here for more from jambands.com

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"In some circles, notably those occupied by fans of Tom Waits, Carney's brand of wacky is a prized assortment of sounds gleaned from saxophones, clarinets, and the odd banjo, trumpet, panpipe, or exotic horn. It perfectly complemented the comically dark, lurching vision that Waits realized on his albums from Frank's Wild Years through The Black Rider; it dominates the sound track Waits fashioned for Night On Earth in 1992."
-- Derk Richardson
S.F. Bay Guardian

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"...Carney playing spoons as if they were castanets then shifting to a weird twin-reed instrument that looks like an iris stalk and sounds like nothing else. Sometime along the way the irrepressible Carney plays a couple of instruments at once, blows on a musette, sings Noh vocals, plays a slide clarinet and slide whistle and is otherwise incorrigible."
-- Phil Elwood
S.F. Examiner

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"I'm not a fan of wacky"
--Courtney Love
(Hole)

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"Having played with him only twice, I am reminded of a cool winter-fresh feelin'"
--J.W.

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"He remains a naturally imaginative improviser, with a real lyrical sense, and one whose humor permeates his work... I especially dig him on alto..."
-- Harvey Pekar

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click here to check out the documentary film that Laura Torell is making about Ralph

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Send Ralph your own review, contact him at: ralph@akroncracker.com