DON’T FORGET TO SMILE
Satirical jazz and blues bard Mose Allison left us on November 11.
When Mose Allison talked to MOJO in December 2009, around the time of his farewell album The Way Of The World, he happened to recall a course he took at Louisiana State University back in the early ’50s. “It was about aesthetics, what was art and what wasn’t art,” he told interviewer Jim Allen. “I remember thinking, Well, those blues things that I’ve been listening to on the jukebox and singing, they’re art!” That recognition of the genius of Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller and – his particular favourite – Nat King Cole was knowledge Allison kept with him in a career spanning six decades. Born on his grandfather’s farm near the village of Tippo in the Mississippi Delta, he could play jukebox blues and boogie woogie tunes by ear from the age of five. Playing trumpet and piano in high school – at 13 he wrote a parodic song called The 14 Day Palmolive Plan – was followed by a stint in the army, leading his own jazz trio and working in dance bands. By 1957 he was based in New York, playing with saxmen Stan Getz, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, among others. Mose began recording solo in 1957, with the elegantly swinging Back Country Suite revealing his subtle combination of bebop and country blues, and the controlled attack in his deft and swinging playing. He also unveiled his laconic, hip singing voice, and a particular kind of satiric insight, on a trenchant 90-second sketch entitled Blues. With its barbed declaration, “Nowadays the old man got all the money and the young man ain’t nothing,” the song would be furiously interpreted by The Who as Young Man Blues on their Live At Leeds album in 1970. Allison’s second album, 1958’s Local Color, would feature Parchman Farm, which in time would be covered by Georgie Fame, John Mayall and Bobbie Gentry. Recording regularly for Prestige, Columbia and Atlantic into the early ’70s, he recorded blues and jazz, sophisticated pop from Broadway and sharp-witted originals such as Your Molecular Structure (played live by Elvis Costello) and the mordant Look Here. The latter was covered by The Clash on their 1980 LP Sandinista! His output on record slowed in the ’70s, but his rapier-like observations lost none of their piquancy, as 1971’s Western Man anatomised uncomfortable American realities and 1982’s Middle Class White Boy wryly considered faux non-conformism. The prescient put-downs of 1976’s Your Mind Is On Vacation, meanwhile, held sentiments destined never to age. In his sixties, he still toured and recorded for Elektra, Verve and Blue Note. On 1996’s Tell Me Something: The Songs Of Mose Allison songs from the canon were re-recorded in a day with the help of superfans Van Morrison and Fame and there were Grammy nominations for the two volumes of The Mose Chronicles: Live In London (2001 and 2002), recorded during his regular visits to the Pizza Express Jazz Club in Soho. Produced by Joe Henry, The Way Of The World closed with Allison duetting with singer-daughter Amy on Buddy Johnson’s 1952 song This New Situation. Mose retired from live work in 2012, and was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for The Arts at in 2013. Hearing of his death, Van Morrison said, “Mose was a brilliant musician, but he was more than that: he was a philosopher. I followed him all of my life, and I was devoted to his music.”
“MOSE WAS A BRILLIANT MUSICIAN… HE WAS A PHILOSOPHER.”
Van Morrison