RIP: Mose Allison dies at 89
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — The Whole Nine Yards
Shadow2700 — 9 years ago(November 15, 2016 03:08 PM)
Mose Allison, a pianist, singer and songwriter who straddled modern jazz and Delta blues, belonging to both styles even as he became a touchstone for British Invasion rockers and folksy troubadours, died on Tuesday at his home in Hilton Head, S.C. He was 89.
His death was confirmed by the singer and songwriter Amy Allison, his daughter.
Mr. Allison began his professional career as a piano player, at a time when his style percussive and jaunty, carried along by a percolating beat suited the sound of the jazz mainstream. In addition to leading his own trio, he worked with some of the major small-group bandleaders of the late 1950s, including the saxophonists Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan.
But he found greater success, and a singular niche, as a singer of his plain-spoken, pungently observant songs, beginning in the early 60s. For the next 50 years he worked almost exclusively as the leader of his own groups.
Mr. Allison used his cool, clear voice to conversational effect, with an easy blues inflection that harked back to his upbringing in rural Mississippi. Backing himself at the piano, he favored a loose call and response between voice and instrument, or between right and left hands, often taking tangents informed by the complex harmonies and rhythmic feints of bebop. His artistic persona, evident in his stage manner as well as his songs, suggested a distillation of folk wisdom in a knowing but unpretentious package.
He was especially revered by 1960s English rockers who idolized the blues, and who saw in his example an accessible ideal. John Mayall recorded Parchman Farm, Mr. Allisons ironic adaptation of a prison blues; so did the English rhythm-and-blues singer Georgie Fame.
Other songs by Mr. Allison found their way onto albums by the Yardbirds, the Kinks and the Clash. The Who based their world-beating anthem My Generation partly on his Young Man Blues, which the band also featured as the opening track on its 1970 album, Live at Leeds.
Mr. Allisons tunes were covered almost as widely by his fellow Americans, including the blues artists Paul Butterfield and Johnny Winter, the country-soul singer Bobbie Gentry and, more recently, the jazz vocalist and pianist Diana Krall. The Pixies, a pace-setting alternative-rock band, named an album track Allison in his honor.
In a 1986 interview with the pianist Ben Sidran, conducted for NPR, Mr. Allison grouped his material into three categories: slapstick, social comment and personal crisis. Sometimes, he added, all three of those elements wind up in a tune. Many of his songs inhabit an air of wry amusement or exasperated skepticism, often pivoting on a single phrase.
He skewered hypocrisies in Everybodys Cryin Mercy, recorded by Bonnie Raitt, and mastered the sardonic put-down in Your Mind Is on Vacation (And Your Mouth Is Working Overtime), covered by Elvis Costello.
For all of his elder-statesman eminence in rock, Mr. Allison never stopped seeing himself as a jazz artist. My definition of jazz is music thats felt, thought and performed simultaneously, he said in Ever Since I Stole the Blues, a 2006 BBC documentary. And thats what Im looking for every night.
Mose John Allison Jr. was born on Nov. 11, 1927, on a family cotton farm near Tippo, Miss. His mother taught elementary school and his father, a self-taught stride piano player, owned a general store. A service station across the road had a jukebox, on which Mr. Allison heard blues singers like Memphis Minnie and Tampa Red.
He began taking piano lessons at 5 and was playing in bands as a young teenager around the same time he wrote his first song, The 14-Day Palmolive Plan, a satirical jab at radio commercials in the style of the saxophonist, singer and bandleader Louis Jordans jump blues. His main hero then was Nat King Cole, a well-regarded jazz pianist who had begun singing, in a smoothly urbane style, with his trio. For a while Mr. Allison also played the trumpet, on local gigs and, after he joined the Army in 1946, with the 179th Army Ground Forces Band.
Mr. Allison had put in a year at the University of Mississippi before his service, and he briefly returned to Ole Miss one reason, perhaps, for his sobriquet the William Faulkner of jazz, popularized by Mr. Sidran. But he soon lost interest in his chosen field, chemical engineering. He ended up graduating from Louisiana State University with an English degree and then briefly worked the Southern club circuit.
Moving to New York City in 1956, he found work as a jazz pianist, initially with the saxophonist Al Cohn. He joined a successful quintet led by Mr. Cohn and his fellow saxophonist Zoot Sims. His style had evolved, in line with modernists like Lennie Tristano and Thelonious Monk, but he still had a trace of the South in his earthy attack, and in his untroubled relationship with blues inflection.
He recorded his debut album, Back Country Suite, for Prestige in 1957. A song cycle for piano trio inspired by his down-home roots, it was well reviewed bu