VARIOUS ARTISTS
If You’re Going To The City: A Tribute To Mose Allison
Iggy Pop, Fiona Apple, Elvis Costello and many more celebrate the eccentric jazz artist.
MOSE Allison was a man of the times for so many different times. Thriving in the postwar jazz scene, he got his first gigs playing piano for Stan Getz and Zoot Sims, developing a style that blended bebop and boogie. He went solo in the 1950s, his albums defying categorisation – is he jazz, blues, pop? – often to his commercial detriment. He enjoyed his greatest success in the 1960s, but his cheerily bleak outlook made him a favourite among Vietnam protestors and society dropouts. And he continued making records into the 21st century, settling into a comfy role as a cult artist.
Even three years after his death, Allison sounds weirdly relevant on this tribute album, which was produced by Don Heffington (Lone Justice, The Jayhawks) and corrals an impressively diverse roster of fans and followers to sing his songs. That deep pessimism persists, both caustic and endearing, each lyric a kind of cosmic punchline. “Ever since the world ended, I don’t go out as much,” Loudon Wainwright III sings on his spry cover of Allison’s ’87 post-apocalyptic bop “Ever Since The World Ended”. The folk paterfamilias is a good pick to deliver such a darkly comic sentiment, playing up the humour while winking at the gloomier implications: “It’s just as well the world ended, it wasn’t working anyway.” Wainwright’s ham-on-wry delivery makes it one of the finest and most pointed moments on this tribute.
The qualities that allowed Allison to enjoy such a long career – his singular personality, his musical malleability, his lackadaisical swing – can make him a difficult artist to honour. The artists on If You’re Going To The City devise two ways to approach his songs: some of them meet him in his world, while others drag him into theirs. The former requires fleetness and agility, which can be hard to muster if you’ve been raised on rock. Peter Case has some fun with “I Don’t Worry About A Thing”, and Richard Thompson loses himself in the role of the unreliable narrator of “Parchman Farm”. But Chrissie Hynde sounds too stiff on “Stop This World”, which is a shame considering how much looser she is on her recent jazz album with The Valve Bone Woe Ensemble.
Others do nearly as well inviting Mose into their own personal space. Among so many jazzy or rootsy covers, the pulsating beats that introduce Iggy Pop’s “If You’re Going To The City” sound like a breath of fresh night air. Pop sounds like he’s giving Mose a tour of the seedier alleyways of Berlin circa 1977, and those wheezing trumpets evoke a red-light district in full crimson glory. It’s an interpretation rather than an imitation, and by far the most irreverent song here.
His daughter Amy Allison, a distinctive singer and songwriter in her own right, duets with Elvis Costello on “Monsters Of The Id”, transforming the song into something like a campfire ghost story. They sound like they’re singing from the foot of your bed, two ghoulies trying to sneak into your dreams. A much more serious take on Mose comes from Bonnie Raitt, who has been performing the antiwar lament “Everybody’s Crying Mercy” since the early 1970s. She contributes a recent live version that redirects Mose’s criticisms toward a more modern world and shows just how thoroughly she has made the song her own.
Two artists suggest there is a third way to approach these songs: Fiona Apple and Robbie Fulks manage to pretend that their world is Mose’s. Fronting The Tippo All Stars, Apple finds a vocal delivery on “Your Molecular Structure” that is jazzily nimble yet forceful, navigating the rippling, ribald meter while exaggerating certain syllables and consonants. She sounds caught up in some kind of mad desire, both energised and beleaguered by a lover’s exceptional “cellular organisation”.
And then there’s Robbie Fulks, whose version of “My Brain” is strange and fittingly deranged. He trades Mose’s piano for a few feistily plucked and picked guitars that speed up, slow down, spiral and spin and create something akin to acoustic musique concrète to depict the frantic inner workings of Fulks’ own grey matter. It’s a smart way to enact some of Mose’s themes in the music, and it suits his wiseacre vocals very well. The world has always been a mess, but he and Mose know that the only thing we can control is how we deal with it.