THIS WEEK’S MUSE
Mose Allison, musician
“As far as I’m concerned, the essentials of jazz are melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing, and instrumental personality.”
Mose Allison was an American jazz and blues pianist and singer. His songs, dependent on mood, humor, and subtle irony, place him in a unique, if somewhat under-celebrated position in 20th century jazz history.
He was born in Tippo, a small town on the Mississippi Delta. Growing up, there was no indoor plumbing, and until he was 13, no electricity. He remembered the day power arrived. “All the lights in Tippo were on that night,” he said. “It looked like Broadway.”
And crucially for the music-loving teenager, the arrival of electricity also meant the arrival of radio. When he wrote his first song, The 14-Day Palmolive Plan, it was about radio commercials.
He came and went from “Ole Miss.” In and out of bands, in and out of the Army, got married, and studied. He mainly played trumpet to make a living and went on the road with a couple of friends to learn his musical craft.
In 1956, he moved to New York City in search of success. “I finally decided,” he said, “if I was going to make a living, I was gonna have to come to New York.” His timing was perfect, slipping into the jazz craze that was starting to sweep the city. “The jazz boom was going on then so there was a lot happening.”
Way downtown, “below Washington Square,” was a new kind of audience receptive to a new kind of performer who, rather than rehashing and reimagining the standards, was starting to “say something” through their own words and music.
When Allison rode into town, with a bag full of new songs, a my-way-attitude, and with “something to say,” he fitted right in. Slowly, through the jazz and blues clubs of late 1950s New York, the singer-songwriter was being born.
Within two years he released his first album, Black Country Suite to unanimous critical acclaim, began playing with jazz greats—Stan Getz, Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Gerry Mulligan to name a few—and formed the Mose Allison Trio.
While some critics might condemn his style as not technically brilliant, he was accomplished, confident, and happy with the furrow he ploughed.
His unpredictable home-grown approach to the piano and his love of improvisation gave his playing—safely rooted in Delta soil—gave him a unique flavor for new audiences to connect to.
And his colorful, descriptive voice was the perfect delivery mechanism for his ironic, witty words.
His success grew out of a new way of doing things. New songs about personal ideas. New ways of composing looked more to a future than to a past, and paving the way, a few years later, for the likes of Dylan, Simon, and Baez – the next new step that would dominate music for years to come.
Maybe his informal, humorous approach to music and writing has prevented him from being as revered as his peers, and today he is something of a hidden gem. But he’d enjoy the irony and probably write a song about it.
“I just try to do as good a job with the material as I can and play some jazz as well, some improvised music, and do that every night. Just see where it goes.”
HAPPENING
Saturday, March 25. 7:30pm
REAL JAZZ IN THE MOMENT
With the Greg Abate Jazz Quartet
This is the real deal. Jazz to the bones. Don’t miss out!
$25