B ill Carney's Jug Addicts apply the twinning principal utilized by Ornette Coleman’s early 60’s groups and the Max Roach Double Quartet to the jug band idiom. The result is a particularly robust and raucous jug band sound free from any archival obsessiveness. Featuring a dynamic palette of vocalists backed by an orchestra of rich, homey, and even elegant sounds. Familiar instruments meet novelty as guitars, fiddles and upright bass line up alongside washboard, kazoo, and washtub bass. The Jug Addicts draw from a broad repertoire of early jazz and Tin Pan Alley standards, blues and country in addition to ragtime and Memphis Jug Band classics. The music delivers the power and drive that can only be created when ten or more musicians dig in and play hard.

NYC 's most powerful jug band, the Jug Addicts, were formed in 1997 out of the ashes of 2 prior jug bands, the Metropolecats and Pork Chop. Having started by blending NYC's top 2 jug bands, the Jug Addicts continue the twinning principle by having 2 of every instrument ... almost. The sound is raucous but with unexpectedly elegant touches and it makes you want to move your body. The Jug Addicts first recording, Cynthia's Kitchen was recorded in a kitchen in NYC's East Village and produced by the somewhat legendary Strokes' Sensei and Guru, JP Bowersock. Their latest CD is The War on Jugs.

There was a lot of music here tonight — by:

BILL CARNEY - washboard

KEN BYRNE - harmonica

BRIAN MULRONEY - washboard

SEAN CONDRON - guitar

STEVE COONEY - slide guitar

ANNA GOODMAN - violin

KARL MEYER - violin

GEORGE RUSH - double bass

This promised to be a fun raucous evening.

It sure was !!!

Praises by others for their performances:

"Anti-social, hell-raising trash-of-all-colors music." “An authentically twisted jug band"
    — Goldfein, Village Voice Diary



"Bill Carney's popular outfit has made the most jug impact in these parts since the Even Dozen and Jim Kweskin jug bands brought much-needed comic relief to the 1960s folk scare. The mix jug outfits have featured since the 1920s — good time blues, country and proto-jazz for party-time messin' around by a whole bunch of people with more or less crude instruments and drinks all around — is the mix here too. What else?"
    — Mazor, Village Voice



"No dithyramb is strong enough to praise these Addicts' approach to ragtime, early blues, jazz, and tin pan alley tunes. No jug is deep enough to contain all the superlatives lavished on them. They have been called Jesus' favorite wedding band, the Einsteins of one four five, Kandinsky's dream, and Bartok's posthumous gift to Brooklyn, and rumor has it that William Carney will be the first person to fill the newly created position of Brooklyn's Universal Maestro."
    — Olivier Conan, Barbes Jazz Club, Brooklyn

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  Link to the Jug Addicts playing Everybody Loves My Baby on YouTube

  Listen to the Jug Addicts on MySpace  

Music from  
  their Cynthia's Kitchen album

Ira Perlman

Jesse Oelbaum

Robert Bruey

Bob Mist

Lois Morton

Mike Meyer

Stuart Markus

Paul Helou

...and Michael Kornfeld