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Carney's Little Carnival Pink Section featured article 5/30/04 -- Joe
Jarrell ******* "...supreme hipsters know
that this sweet guy with the muttonchop sideburns and fine Hawaiian
shirts is the king of the new wave horn." ******* "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." "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." ******* "...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" ******* "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." ******* "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. ******* "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." ******* "...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." ******* "I'm not a fan of wacky"
******* "Having played with him
only twice, I am reminded of a cool winter-fresh feelin'" ******* "He remains a naturally
imaginative improviser, with a real lyrical sense, and one whose humor
permeates his work... I especially dig him on alto..." ******* click here to check out the documentary film that Laura Torell is making about Ralph ******* Send Ralph your own review, contact him at: ralph@akroncracker.com |