Mose Allison R.I.P.

[JSngry]

I guess when you found him has to do with how you imagine him, but for me, he was one of those guys like Mingus, Fathead, MJQ, Rahsaan, Yusef, Ornette, Herbie Mann, even, these guys pretty much were Atlantic Records jazz to me. That an artist as "one of these things is not like the others" as Mose could and did not just fit but thrive in that label-esthetic identity speaks to me as a matter of import. Atlantic Jazz in that day had its own niche as much as did any label.

And I really dug Mose's piano playing, especially as he got deeper into it, the two-hand independence thing got pretty intense at times.

RIP, and again...

[Big Beat Steve]

Strange. Label-wise, to me Mose Allison rhymes with Prestige. (Yes, my focus is on his earlier works, and what I've head I really enjoy)

RIP

 

[JSngry]

Yeah, I get that. My conscious experience with jazz and jazz record stores and jazz radio begins in the early 70s, pre-reissue boom. What I saw in the record stores and heard on the radio was Mose Allison Atlantic stuff. Not that much of the Prestige catalog stuff was really on the shelves outside of mom-and-pop stores where it had been sitting. Atlantic kept 'em coming, and Atlantic made sure the covers looked "new". I was actually shocked at how "old" the music sounded, this was the guy who was covered by The Who, these Atlantic albums all looked kinda modernish, so I'm expecting something like "Your Mind Is On Vacation" to get kinda, you know...warp-y, but put the record on and here's this drawly guy playing pretty weird piano with an acoustic trio. CRAZY!

And then these happened, and then things started changing. Never again would "reissues" not be a part of the everyday mindset of everyday jazz fans.

• PR 24001   Miles Davis
• PR 24002   Mose Allison
• PR 24003   John Coltrane
• PR 24004   Sonny Rollins
• PR 24005   The Modern Jazz Quartet
• PR 24006   Thelonious Monk

Surely it was a "you had to be there" thing, at least in part, but those middle-60s-early 1970s Atlantic jazz records did more than their part as far as making the records look like something that "young people" might want to engage in.

[Big Beat Steve]

2 hours ago, JSngry said:

Yeah, I get that. My conscious experience with jazz and jazz record stores and jazz radio begins in the early 70s, pre-reissue boom. What I saw in the record stores and heard on the radio was Mose Allison Atlantic stuff. Not that much of the Prestige catalog stuff was really on the shelves outside of mom-and-pop stores where it had been sitting. Atlantic kept 'em coming, and Atlantic made sure the covers looked "new". I was actually shocked at how "old" the music sounded, this was the guy who was covered by The Who, these Atlantic albums all looked kinda modernish, so I'm expecting something like "Your Mind Is On Vacation" to get kinda, you know...warp-y, but put the record on and here's this drawly guy playing pretty weird piano with an acoustic trio. CRAZY!

And then these happened, and then things started changing. Never again would "reissues" not be a part of the everyday mindset of everyday jazz fans.

• PR 24001   Miles Davis
• PR 24002   Mose Allison
• PR 24003   John Coltrane
• PR 24004   Sonny Rollins
• PR 24005   The Modern Jazz Quartet
• PR 24006   Thelonious Monk

 

Yes, I think those Prestige twofers had a profound effct on all of us who got started in the 70s.

As for being "covered by The Who", actually my first exposure to Mose Allison's repertoire was listening to "Parchman Farm" as played (a bit uptempo) by The Nashville Teens (a Brit-R&B group who covered the song in 1964 for Decca). The lyrics just stuck because by that time I had already read a bit about the history of Parchman Farm in various country blues books (thank you, Paul Oliver! ) Then some time later I heard Mose Allison's original on the radio and was .... well, intrigued ("So this is where they got it from") by this uncanny mix of "white jazzman singing and playing the blues in a way that is neither white nor black".

Edited November 16, 2016 by Big Beat Steve

[medjuck]

I first heard him in London 2 or 3 times (not sure which) in the summer of 1964. Hadn't heard of him before.   Next time I saw him he was opening for Van Morrison a huge fan of his. Earliest record I have of  him he's playing piano for Zoot and Al and there's no mention in the liner notes that he sings.  An original.  Not many of those around. 

[JSngry]

 

Hello Joe, whaddya know?

 

LOOK OUT!!!! STAND BACK!!!!

 

[JSngry]

7 hours ago, Big Beat Steve said:

As for being "covered by The Who", actually my first exposure to Mose Allison's repertoire was listening to "Parchman Farm" as played (a bit uptempo) by The Nashville Teens (a Brit-R&B group who covered the song in 1964 for Decca).

I might be wrong, but the first time I heard that one was on the flip side of Blue Cheer's 45 of "Summertime Blues"!

Yeah, this:

So....yeah...from Blue Cheer covering Mose Allison to the real Mose Allison...that was a mindfuck of its own kind.

RIP Mose.

 

[GA Russell]

The Yardbirds' cover of I'm Not Talking was included on their (US Epic) Greatest Hits LP.  That was the first time I heard one of his songs.

[skeith]

He was a favorite of mine.  I will be listening again.

[GA Russell]

On 11/16/2016 at 8:28 AM, JSngry said:

I guess when you found him has to do with how you imagine him, but for me, he was one of those guys like Mingus, Fathead, MJQ, Rahsaan, Yusef, Ornette, Herbie Mann, even, these guys pretty much were Atlantic Records jazz to me.

Jim, as I recall, your list plus Coltrane made up the entirety of the Fall, 1969, Atlantic Best of's I referred to earlier.

[JSngry]

Exactly. Those records were damn near everywhere too.

Oh yeah, Eddie Harris too.

[GA Russell]

Harris.  Right.

[jeffcrom]

I have friends who dismiss Mose's songs as lightweight and superficially "clever." Yeah, sometimes, maybe. But shortly before he died I transcribed the lyrics of "Let It Come Down," which a friend described as "existentialism in two minutes."

The punctuation and line breaks are mine. I laid this out to work as a poem on the page.

Let It Come Down

Fretting 'bout what you're going through,
Regretting the things you didn't do,
Relying on compensations you found;

Groaning beneath the weight of it,
Bemoaning the fickle fate of it,
Complying just to keep both feet on the ground.

That won't get you any place,
Won't excuse you from the race.
When you meet your destiny face to face,

There'll be no more wrong or right,
And no more "wish I might."
And if there's going to be rain tonight,

Let it come down.

[six string]

R.I.P. Mose.

 

I enjoy the Prestige and Atlantic sides but I haven't ventured out beyond there so I am guilty as well.  The drummer on hos early stuff, Ron Free was involved with the loft in NYC chronicled by W. Eugene Smith, the Life photographer.  

[Big Beat Steve]

8 hours ago, jeffcrom said:

I have friends who dismiss Mose's songs as lightweight and superficially "clever."

Not even getting into THIS use of the word "clever" which I find just utterly silly, I was half expecting a response like this ever since this thread started because I have heard these feelings by some too (a long time ago). Probably people who like their lives heavy and crude.   In their case it was a matter of blues (or blues-like music) being only acceptable if sung in croaky voices by old men sitting in the gutter. Unfortunately not all that rare an attitude among a certain category of European blues fanatics at that time.

 

[JSngry]

"Clever" doesn't account for all that is left over after the clever runs out...when it's songs about "characters", yeah, they can kind of run out about a mile and a half after the clever. But the songs about, for lack of a better term, "the human condition", something like "Monsters Of The Id", those things run out of clever and keep on going and going and going...It's the difference between "yeah, but" and "yeah...". Mose did his share of the former, but more than his share of the latter.

[Big Beat Steve]

- deleted - immaterial now.

Edited November 18, 2016 by Big Beat Steve

[JSngry]

I hear the Big Beat, I do. Plenty of sociological fetishism has clouded plenty of perceptions, plenty of myopic pigeonholing allowing for plenty of programmed reflexism as to what any particular "is" really consists of.

Mose Allison - Yeah, Southern, yeah, Missisppi, but also yeah, Zoot & Al and also some weirdass piano playing. Your "blues" is where you find it, and if your lines don't blur, Mose as "blues" is a wishful thinking or a wishful rejection, depending on what part of your intellectual turf you're defending.

The only way I hear Mose as "blues" is when I open the thought that "blues" involves at least as much (if not more) an outlook on the fundamental underpinnings of life, as it does an emotional reaction to it's ongoing immediacies.

But, yes, I do open that thought, and it does stay open, it's hard to close it once it's open, actually.

[JSngry]

God knows, Big BS & I often butt heads (in a friendly way, I hope), but in this case, I think I'm hearing him saying that it is exactly that "ignorance" that he is pointing/calling out.

He's more than capable of speaking for himself, but hey, it's Friday. Let's dance.

[paul secor]

I hear what you're saying, Jim. There's been too much bitterness around here lately, and I don't want to add to it. I'm deleting my posts on this subject and will dance (as well as I can).

[Big Beat Steve]

@JSangrey: Yes, friendly I hope too, and keeping within certain limits.

@Paul Secor: No comment about deleting posts (I will have to delete my reply to you above too, then, because it has lost its meaning now) but sorry if I was unable to get across to you that statement that was intentionally poignant (and - yes - exaggerated) to bring out the gist of the problem. I appreciate country blues as much as most others but to the exclusion of most everything else in blues?? As all too many were apt to do for a long time? All those old (and preferably "rediscovered") black artists were touted as the latest word in every imaginable way for quite some time. And beyond that - a very, very narrow line was drawn by some of those "powers that be of the blues scene" for all too long about what was "commercial" (as if the old blues bards in their time had not been out to make a buck or two with their music and please their buying listeners too) and "not worthy of serious interest". You had to be (relatively) old and rough to be "the real thing". Joe Williams (as opposed to Big Joe, of course)? Charles Brown? Percy Mayfield? Ivory Joe Hunter? "Commercial!" And so on and so on.  Or Roy Milton or Joe Liggins or Louis Jordan (heaven beware!) or whoever else in that vein? Musical competence above a certain level seeemed to speak against the artists, regardless of whether those who were being touted instead "could't play shit" (to quote some Detroit R&B musicians re- John Lee Hooker as per "Before Motown" - note I am ONLY quoting, not agreeing, though I see where they came from). And it was in those circles of "advanced" listeners and collectors that I heard reservations about Mose Allison (to bring things full circle) - rather along the lines of "neither flesh nor fowl" and "white man has no point singing the blues like that". Stated by WHITES who probably thought of themselves as being at the forefront of "true" blues connoisseurs. And, sorry to say, no doubt,reflecting a tendency even among scribes of where the priorities were supposed to be. Just look at what Leadbitter EXCLUDED expressly from the first edition of his discography. No matter how highly I valued his discography at that time for what it was it made me cringe for what it was NOT (as I had taken an interest in what might labeled R&B in the wider sense at an early stage).

Hope I have been able to make my point NOW.

Edited November 18, 2016 by Big Beat Steve

[page]

R.I.P. Mose.
Is it just me or does it seem like all of my heroes are passing away in a hurry... Very sad.

[Ted O'Reilly]

My good friend Steve Wallace, a front-rank bassist has developed over the last couple of years into an important writer, especially on jazz topics. 

He recently blogged about Mose Allison's passing, in the context of having worked with him on many occasions.  I suggest reading it, and adding your name to Steve's subscription list...

http://wallacebass.com/?p=5240

[mikeweil]

Just got me this CD with interesting versions of his vocal tunes, including a DVD with a documentary by by Paul Bernays, Mose Allison: Every Since I Stole The Blues. I will reported after I have watched the DVD.

https://www.discogs.com/Various-If-Youre-Going-To-The-City-A-Tribute-To-Mose-Allison/release/14516607

http://www.fatpossum.com/announcing-if-youre-going-to-the-city-a-tribute-to-mose-allison/

http://www.fatpossum.com/taj-mahal-jackson-browne-celebrate-the-legendary-mose-allison/

 

Edited August 7, 2021 by mikeweil