Billboard : 06/09/1958
Two stars

A package of tasteful jazz ranging from funky blues to urban performances of standards. Allison plays piano, trumpet and does vocals, with A. Farmer on bass and N. Stabulas on drums. An intimate relaxed quality pervades. Readings of Ray Charles’ Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand, Don’t Get Around Much Anymore and Sleepy Time Gal are typical of the material.

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Cash Box : 06/28/1958

This cozy session features not only the Allison keyboard but also three stints by the performer as a vocalist, and one as a trumpeter. In either role, Allison plays his part with style. Backed nicely by Addison Farmer on bass, and Nick Stabulas on drum, the artist roams smartly over the keyboard, is touched by the blues when vocalizing, and inviting in his delectable trumpet work on Stroll. A big, ten-tune jazz bill that says a lot for Allison.

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Audio
Charles A. Robertson : September, 1958

Alter introducing his delightful southern sketches on his first two albums, Mose Allison treats a sheaf of standard tunes in the same individual style. The resulting mixture of old and new is refreshing in its element of surprise and the recasting of familiar themes. His single-line piano statements bear a close resemblance to his laconic, unstrained vocals on Don’t Get Around Much Anymore, I Hadn’t Anyone Till You, and Let Me Hold Your Hand. His lone composition is for muted trumpet, played against a background of Addison Farmer‘s bass and the drums of Nick Stabulas. Its title, Stroll, is indicative of its carefree nature. Fed by his memories of country blues singers and the ragtime playing of his father, Allison’s roots give him an advantage over most young modernists, though some may boast more technical proficiency. Like Thelonious Monk, he always has something to say and the means to say it, making him the most distinctive new pianist to emerge since Horace Silver.

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HiFi / Stereo Review
Nat Hentoff : September, 1958

In Young Man Mose, pianist Mose Allison makes fewer specific references to his rural Mississippi background and an early saturation in the blues than in his two previous collections, Back Country Suite and Local Color. The blues spirit, however, continues to pervade most of his performances: and his three casual but intense vocals are also firmly touched by the blues. In this program of standards and a couple of originals, Allison is refreshingly spare in his piano playing, using each note as an organic part of his interpretation rather than figure-skating across the keyboard in displays of technique. His basic characteristic might be described as a virile lyricism, buttressed by a strong, relaxed beat. He also plays competent trumpet on one number. There is grace in everything he does, a quality that comes, I expect, from his self-assurance in his unaffected role as an authentic, modern “down home” jazzman. His rhythm support is accurate and sympathetic.

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Jazz Journal
Sinclair Traill : July, 1959

Mose Allison here forsakes his own compositions for more standard fare, but still manages to instil his own particular brand of wispy blues music into these old tunes. Perhaps because I know and love many of these oldies I like this record even better than his more famous Back Country Suite. The ultra slow version of How Long Has This Been Going On sounds so relaxed it is almost disdainful, and much the same can be said for the very restrained Sleepy Time Gal. I Told Ya is a real swinger and Don’t Get Around, Baby and I Hadn’t Anyone all feature Allison’s near off-pitch vocals. His fill-in phrases behind his vocals should not be missed. He never plays a note too many and the style is quite personal to himself.

Stroll has him playing trumpet. The style is parallel to his piano playing, but for some reason the general picture he creates reminds me of Bix. The sound isn’t the same of course but wouldn’t this man have fitted perfectly into the Hoagy Carmichael-Bix Beiderbecke picture of the late twenties? But his music is timeless, for he works always in his own style, a method he has formed to express his own individual personality.

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Jazz Journal
Oliver Howes : July, 1959

A remarkable young man arrived unheralded at London Airport on Friday, April 24th, spent a couple of quiet days in London, and flew out again on the Sunday, bound for the United States by way of Glasgow. Young Man Mose—pianist, trumpeter, singer and composer Mose Allison—had been and gone. That this young man, who caused such a furore last year with the issue of his Back Country Suite, should have slipped in and out of town with so little fuss was perhaps only to be expected, for when I met him I found the self-effacement and dislike of publicity to be completely in character.

I began by speaking of “a remarkable young man.” Why remarkable? Well, consider. On the strength of two records—Back Country Suite and Local Color, issued here by Esquire—Mose Allison now possesses a reputation that amounts almost to legend. Back Country Suite received the sort of critical acclaim normally reserved for such records as Louis Armstrong plays W. C. Handy or The Atomic Mr. Basie — masterworks from established stars. Yet Mose Allison was no established star: Britain did not even know he existed. Most remarkable of all, however, is that today, a full year after the release of his first record, we know little more about Mose Allison than we know about some of the legendary giants of New Orleans.

Through a sheer stroke of fortune — fortune, that is, assisted in no small way by B.B.C. producer Jack Dabbs and broadcaster Charles Melville (who recorded an interview with Mose that should be broadcast during July)—I was privileged to meet Mose Allison during his brief stay, and was able to talk to him at sufficient length to fill out some of the gaps in the story of Young Man Mose.

To understand the music of Mose Allison—and, really, the style is a paradox in itself—it is necessary to follow his story from its very earliest days, to appreciate the various jazz forms that have influenced his style along the way. It is necessary too to appreciate that, when Mose first took an active interest in music, times bore little relation either to the early days of the older generation of jazzmen in the South or to the times affecting his own contemporaries in the North. Unlike his Northern contemporaries, the background to Mose’ early days was the quiet country life of the South, so graphically described in Back Country Suite. Unlike the first generations of jazzmen from the South (Mose might well be described as third generation; for if Buddy Bolden was of the first, then Louis Armstrong was of the second, and Louis was at his prime when Mose was born) Mose was subject not only to his rural environment, but also to outside influences by way of the gramophone record: It must be remembered that when Mose was at the impressionable age of 14—in 1941—the Ellington band was was at what many would call its peak; the boppers had been at work at Minton’s for over a year; and it was already fourteen years since Bix Beiderbecke had written In a mist. So Mose was open to pretty well all available sources of influence from his earliest days. It is this setting of varied modern influences against a background of folk music and the blues that has produced the style that is Mose Allison’s, the piano style that combines the technique of Al Haig and Bud Powell with the feel—the funk if you like—of the early blues pianists. (On the subject of funk, Shelly Manne had his say in a Down Beat “Cross Section”—”Funk is as old as jazz. It’s an earthly quality of playing, dating back to the original blues. A guy like Mose Allison plays funk because its natural.”) It is this paradoxical background that has produced also a trumpet style that, while it includes the tone and approach of Clayton and Edison and often the phrasing of the moderns, prompted Ira Gitler to speak of overtones of Joe Oliver. Finally, Allison possesses a style of singing that is at once blue and folksy yet immediately reminiscent of Hoagy Carmichael. Such then is the style; what of the man?

Let me begin at the beginning, back in Tippo, Mississippi, where Mose was born on November 11th, 1927. His father owned a general store and had been a ragtime pianist and it was he who persuaded Mose to learn piano at High School. It was in Tippo that Mose had his first contact with the most basic form of jazz, the blues, though according to Mose this was mainly through the medium of the jukebox at the local flling station, where he heard Tampa Red, Memphis Slim and Big Maceo among others. So far as the piano was concerned, it was mainly boogie that Mose heard in Tippo. “I remember we used to listen to Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons, and I guess the first influences on my playing must have been the blues singers and boogie pianists I heard then.”

Oddly enough, the first conscious knowledge that Mose had of jazz as jazz, rather than as part of his local background, was through the record collection of a High School friend in the early forties. In this way he discovered the Basie Band and Louis Armstrong, and the first conscious influence on his piano playing, Nat Cole. It was in that period, too, that he took up trumpet. “I guess the earliest influences there must have been much the same as with any kid then, Harry James and Louis Armstrong, though by the time I’d got a grasp of the trumpet I was digging Buck Clayton. Nowadays I guess I listen most to Dizzy and Sweets Edison.”

Mose left home for the University of Mississippi in 1944, and it was then that he came into contact with the modernists. It was then, too, that he first began writing his own music, for Back Country Suite was started in 1945. The Army claimed him in 1946, but he was back at University again in 1948. However, he left in 1949 and gigged around for a while before forming his first trio in 1950 with bassist Taylor La Fargue and drummer Paul Lovas. The trio soon broke up and Mose joined the Burt Massingale band. In 1951 he left the band and went back to University, this time the Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, from which he eventually graduated with a B.A. in English in 1952. But not before he had added to his musical experience with tenorist Brew Moore on a three month gig in Baton Rouge, and made an abortive visit to New York, where he wrote some arrangements for Buddy de Franco’s big band.

The B.A. safely in his pocket, Mose turned seriously to jazz again. He reformed his trio and worked through
Texas. 1953 found him in Denver playing with Shelley Rym, and 1954 found him back on the road again, mostly with his own trio. Success didn’t really begin to come his way until 1956 when he arrived in New York, now his permanent base. The first stroke of fortune was joining Al Cohn at the Pad in 1956, during which year he played around town with Cohn and with Bob Brookmeyer and Zoot Sims. In February, 1957, he joined Stan Getz, and in February, 1958, he was with a Gerry Mulligan Quartet, along with Henry Grimes and Dave Bailey. Since 1956 he has recorded with Getz (one session), with Cohn and Brookmeyer (two sessions), and with Cohn and Sims (two sessions).

The most important aspect, however, of Mose Allison’s musical life is not his work with other groups but with his own trio, for it is with his trio—to be strictly accurate I should say his trios, for Addison Farmer took over on bass in 1957, and Nick Stabulas took over on drums in the same year later to be superceeded by Ronnie Free—that he has made his reputation, and it is in this setting that he prefers to play. And it is with the trio that he has recorded, quite prolifically, for the Prestige label in the States. At the time of writing three albums have been released there, with three more to follow. In England Back Country Suite, Local Color and Young Man Mose have been issued by Esquire. On this last the style remains as before—modernism with its roots in the blues and folk music, though with a slight broadening of scope to include a Latin-flavoured I told ya I love ya, now get out. (The Latin inclination is something I had no inkling of till, when Mose was in London, he asked whether he could hear anything of that nature anywhere.) While he was in London, too, I heard him play and sing Ellington’s Don’t get around much anymore, and this is included on Young Man Mose. The only substantial difference to his previous work is in his trumpet playing on his own composition, Stroll. The style appears far more modern: perhaps the Edison/Gillespie influence is beginning to assert itself, for Stroll is a far cry from the earlier Trouble in mind. I asked Mose what we might expect from the three remaining albums. Apparently one will be similar to Local Color, another an album of character sketches, and the third, similar to Young Man Mose, composed of standards which Mose refers to as “Tunes that haven’t been played to death and have interesting changes for me to play on.”

Enough for the moment, however, about his recordings and history. What of the present, and of the man himself? Whoever it was who said Le style, c’est l’homme même might well have been speaking of Mose Allison. Even at its most ebullient, his music retains a certain quietness, even reticence. So it Is With Mose, a very shy young man, not given to talking much at all, least of all about himself. Not for him the cool talk of the aspiring modernist; instead an obviously educated, intelligent voice overlaid with the drawl of his native South. In fact he seems the very antithesis of the popular conception of the jazzman (mind you, he does like Scotch with a Lager chaser). With his wife Audrey and their two children, he lives at Elmhurst, just outside New York. again a quiet conventional sort of existence.

Despite the natural reticence, though, Mose did talk at length over a breakfast of eggs and bacon, and I think many of his opinions well worth quoting. Of course, I had to tax him first on the subject of influences, and part of the answer surprised me. “I should say currently Al Haig and John Lewis. No, not Horace Silver I think. Maybe there was a mutual influence there. Mind you, I don’t consciously try to sound like anyone or anything. I think it most important that I should sound like Mose Allison, and that I should like the way I sound.”

Favourite musicians were next. “On piano of course John Lewis and Monk, and I think Al Haig is a flip. Zoot Sims has a lot to say, and I like what Art Farmer is doing these days.”

On experimentation in jazz, and on the current jazz scene, Mose had some pretty strong opinions. “There’s a lot of guys trying to do something different. Some succeed, like John Coltrane. There’s a lot of far-out cats experimenting with tonality and so forth, though, in my opinion, nothing’s really new. Someone has always been there before you. The trouble today is that too many people sit around waiting for something to happen, something new, something different. That’s not how things happen. If he’s going to play jazz, a man must use all the elements in his music. It’s a kind of cumulative thing. He takes all the elements and builds his own approach on them, and that’s jazz. If it’s completely new it’s not jazz.”

Of course, when I met him Mose was on his way back from Sweden and the Continent. When I asked him how he enjoyed playing there I let loose some pretty strong opinions on audiences. “I enjoyed playing in Sweden all right, though I wish I had had my own trio with me. The audiences were more enthusiastic, and certainly more appreciative than in the States. American audiences are inclined to be aloof, perhaps because they have so much jazz there, and they’ve heard it all before. In Europe you seem to have more open minds about your jazz. A man can like the M.J.Q. and and blues singers and nobody minds. In the States there’s too many cliques, just liking one sort of jazz, and taking no notice of the rest. You don’t hear about the older men. It’s always ‘what’s new?'”

Mose says he would like to come back to this side of the Atlantic again soon, preferably with his trio. He’d like to play again in Paris (where he played at the Blue Note with Pierre Michelot and Kenny Clarke) and he’d like to play in England. When he does he is assured of a warm welcome from at least one quarter.

Mose Allison is a modernist with his roots in the blues and the folk music of his native Mississippi. And that, to me, is the most important thing about him—the roots. It’s the most important thing to Mose himself. As he says, “The blues is like a religion.”

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Metronome
Allen Scott : March, 1959
Country and Eastern Jazz Pianist

The bare-bones music of pianist-singer Mose Allison is much too personal and too deeply-rooted in the tradition of the blues and work-song to ever attract a following similar to that which followed in the backwash of Charlie Parker.

While immensely enjoyable on its own merits, the end-products of the Allison talent may be performing an even greater service to jazz by prodding younger musicians into taking a much-needed backward look into the traditional sources from which their art has sprung.

Whether a vocal solo, a piano chorus or an extended composition, Mose Allison’s work has one distinguishing characteristic – the complete absence of superfluous notes, frilly passages and gaudy backgrounds. Mose is quick to admit that much of his own work has been synthesized until “it’s an end in itself.” He cited Parchman Farm, the wry recital of a prisoner on a Deep South work farm.

The gentleman in question is “… stuffin’ cotton in a seven-foot sack, with a 12-gauge shotgun at my back.” He “never did no man no harm” and adds, “I’ll be here for the rest of my life,” and “all I did was shoot my wife.”

What could be added to this tale?

“I have a feeling for the type of material I do, probably because I believe it has been neglected,” Mose says. “All the new models in music seem to be getting worked to death so I’d like to renew some of the old ones.”

The first three Allison albums – Back Country Suite, Local Color and Young Man Mose – reflected the artist’s Southern influences so markedly that there is a tendency to think of Mose only in the backwoods and cotton gin context, an approach that he doesn’t completely accept.

“Although you are naturally influenced by your background, you’re bound to build up a set of basic ideas about life no matter what your geographical background is. You form ideas of music and life whether you come from Mississippi or the Mid-West. These spring from the type of person you are and from the things that have happened to you. In music, anyone plays according to his inclinations and convictions,” Mose says.

Mose John Allison, Jr., arrived 31 years ago in Tippo, Miss., a small rural community not too far from Greenwood. There, Mose Allison, Sr., operated a large farm and a country store. The store served as an informal gathering place for the community and here young Mose received his introduction to music. To help this education along, he received help from his father, an ex-ragtime pianist. The country blues which he heard preached a powerful sermon, Mose relates. “With some people, the instrument comes first, but with me, it was jazz first. After I heard the music, I wanted to learn just enough piano to be able to carry my ideas. I was interested in technique too, but the ideas were there first,” Mose says. He lists Al Haig, Nat Cole and Thelonious Monk as his principal piano influences.

Beginning with piano, Mose later took up trumpet, only to return to the keyboard when he found the trumpet wouldn’t do everything he wanted. However, the trumpet is still carried along and trotted out for an occasional tune.

Between the years 1945 and 1952, Mose mixed music, college and an Army tour, beginning his college work at the University of Mississippi and finishing with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English, at Louisiana State University. The years also included tours with Burt Massingale, an Army stint where Mose played with trombonist Tommy Turk and dates with his own trio.

After college, Mose again hit the road with his own group and played an extended date in Denver, Colo., the scene of his Army service. Most of the touring was done in the southern half of the U. S.

He first came to New York in 1956 to work with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, later moving on to small groups led by Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker and Stan Getz. His work as a sideman in these admittedly modern units would appear to contradict those who are inclined to view Mose as only a traditionalist, operating in a restricted field.

The appearance of first Allison album, Back Country Suite, catapulted Mose into prominence, giving rise to the usual comments about an unknown springing full-blown on to the national jazz scene. This reaction, although understandable, points up on facet of the music business which Mose would like to see changed.

“The distribution in jazz is so unbalanced. A few musicians acquire a reputation and are overdrawn in the public eye, while at the same time, there are thousands of guys — just as good — whom no one ever hears about.” Mose can speak from experience on both sides of the fence on this question.

The transplanted Mississippian notices a marked difference between work in the hinterlands and dates in New York. “New York is tough,” he says. “There are more pressures and a great deal more tensions there, and there is an almost insidious pressure to play in someone else’s style.

“I played around the Southwest and other places for years and the basic elements of my style were pretty well complete when I got to New York. I have tried to get a unit sound and I think we’re succeeding in that vein with the trio.”

Working regularly with bassist Addison Farmer and drummer Ronnie Free, Mose relies strongly on his own material during club dates but adds variety with some crackling up-tempo treatments of standards and crisp versions of modern works. Farmer, a brilliant performer, gets adequate time to show his talents in solo work as does Ronnie Free. Mose is a firm believer in drum sticks, rather than brushes. The sturdy rhythm enhances the stark quality of the Allison book.

Mose has also worked with bassist Henry Grimes and drummer Winston Welch.

Prestige Records did jazz fans a large favor when the company finally graced the third Allison album with a picture of the artist. Until that time, Mose was more or less of a mystery man of unknown name and origin. The vocals on the recordings only serve to heighten the mystery. Recording engineers vow that without amplification, Mose can’t be heard four feet away, but this bothers Mose not a bit. “I’ve always sung that way and it feels natural.”

By “that way,” Mose refers to a thin, plaintive and utterly weary song style — that of an old man who has seen nearly every kind of misfortune this cruel world has to offer and is certain that more of the same is heading his way. The style isn’t original. Mose says, “It’s straight from Percy Mayfield, a blues singer I heard a long time ago. I’ve patterned myself after him. I try to keep out any sign of factitious energy.”

This idea of conserving energy carries over into the Allison views on writing. “No big bands for me, there’s too much wasted energy. A 10-piecer would be about as big as I’d want to write for or play with.” While a feeling for a mood, capturing impressions and retaining humor are the hallmarks of Mose’s own compositions, he is equally concerned with musical discipline.

Mose prefers club work to concerts. “I like music to be fluent and uncontrived. The important thing is simply to get in the mood and let it flow — something that doesn’t happen too often at concerts. There always seems to be an aura of grave dedication about the concert setting. Since you never really get warmed up, you can’t relax.

“Of course there are disadvantages to club work too. Some audiences build a barrier between themselves and the music, never giving the music a chance. Audiences have a definite function in any performance but few of them realize it.

“I keep remembering a man who approached me in the Village Vanguard and said, ‘Gee, we liked your records a lot, but you were so bad here that we didn’t even listen.’ What can you tell someone like that?” Mose asks.

Soft-spoken Mose, whose shy introductions of numbers border on the apologetic, probably just shrugged off the monumental rudeness of the comment. However, the non-listener may get into print in another form, via a Mose Allison fiction work.

“I haven’t arrived at any writing style as yet but I keep at it. Some of the literary quarterlies have been encouraging in their comments on my short stories. Most of them need rewriting, but at least it’s a start toward a backstop career if I had to leave the musical field,” Mose says. He says his settings are drawn from music experiences, childhood memories and in one case — a parable.

The comment, “… if I had to leave the music field,” provides a valuable clue to the Allison outlook on life; a life that stretches far beyond the limited horizons of a jazz club. It embraces three important A’s in Mose’s life; his wife Audrey, and daughters Alissa, 4, and Amy, born last July.

At one point in 1958, Mose was ready to go back to his Mississippi home to take over management of affairs there when his father was stricken by a serious illness. Although the crisis passed without the necessity of Mose leaving jazz, his readiness to take up a family responsibility demonstrates an unusual departure from the stereotyped super-hipster.

This discipline and determination are good for jazz, good for Mose and good for a public which seems guaranteed to be hearing from Mr. Allison for a good long time.

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New York Daily News (New York, NY)
Don Nelson : 06/01/1958
A Young Man Mose’s Music

Every now and then the jazz scene turns up a musician who shows no signs of becoming a giant but who is quite remarkable within his own groove. Such a fellow is Mose Allison, the Mississippi pianist now commanding a trio at the Village Vanguard.

What makes Allison so singular is his amazing ability to create musical pictures. His work is about the closest thing to an actual portrait of an artist and his background that is available in jazz today. Blues-couched impressions of people, places and events in rural life skitter through his compositions and, indeed, form the basis for many of them. They also dictate his conception of the more familiar material played by his fellow jazz pianists. To say that he is a Mark Twain of the piano may sound slightly ridiculous but it would certainly not be too far off target.

His playing, like the music he writes, shows a lack of com- plexity. There are no technical triumphs here for the simple reason that Allison is no technical genius. But this is not the important consideration in this instance. Listening, you can hear echoes of a field hand’s song, picture the raucous excitement of a small town at the coming of a carnival and feel the sadness and even the humor of a prisoner’s plight. He sings, too, and not badly, either. This is the music of Mose Allison—and it’s good music.

He is sensitively supported by Addison Farmer on bass and Ronnie Free on drums.

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San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, CA)
Ralph J. Gleason : 08/03/1958

This is the laddie who made a mark for himself last fall singing country blues and playing a Cow Cow Davenport type piano. Here he goes modern (with greater success, by the way) in his playing but he still sings. I am afraid that I just do not get with it when Allison vocalizes. His voice, on both ballads and blues, is grotesque to me. On the piano, however, he is better than fair soloist with a genuine feeling for the blues.

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Toronto Star (Toronto, ON, Canada)
Roger Feather : 07/12/1958
Four stars

Allison is the young Mississippian pianist who first gained prominence on record playing his charmingly original Back Country Suite He followed that shortly with Local Color and this album titled Young Man Mose is his third. Allison’s music is colored by his background of “down home” country blues. He has a lazy, reflective style which includes a rather sly humor and an economy of notes.

Much of the freshness of Allison’s earlier work was in his writing. On this LP he plays nine rarely heard standards and only one original. Although this lack of his own work takes something away from the album, the material is well-chosen. He sings three tunes in a latter-day Hoagy Carmichael manner including a meaningful Don’t Get Around Much Anymore and a plaintive Ray Charles blues Baby, Let Me Hold Your Hand. His muted trumpet, styled somewhere between Harry Edison and Miles Davis, is heard on the sprightly original Stroll.

Allison’s articulate, lyrical piano is excellent on the quiet How Long Has This Been Going On, the rollicking Bye Bye Blues and the Latin-flavored I Told Ya I Love Ya, Now Get Out. My Kinda Love has some good Stabulas who, teamed with Farmer, provides a tight, pulsating rhythm section throughout the album. The best of Allison’s style is epitomized in a wonderful, relaxed Sleepy Time Girl. This convincing tune has a rare, flowing lyricism and a timeless style.

Allison is an intriguing young musician who well deserves the exposure he is receiving. The variety he exhibits here further enhances the album.

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Down Beat : 09/04/1958
Dom Cerulli : 4 stars

Mose strays from his own material to investigate some standards, but his personal touch remains, as, for instance, on the little fill phrases behind his vocal on Don’t Get Around Much.

His basic blues conception remains, however, in his treatment of the non-Allison material. And while it is not as strong as, say, his Back Country Suite, it does have the flavor of those sketches.

This, I think, is Allison’s greatest asset. It could be argued that he “makes everything sound the same,” but while that may be apparently true, it’s a shallow surface observation. Whether he works with his own material or with songs of others, he is always working in his style, and without bending or warping material to fit that style.

On Stroll, Mose plays a tight, somewhat wispy muted trumpet, in keeping with the feeling his piano establishes.

To sum up, this set is another good Allison LP but not as constantly stimulating as his earlier sets, largely because he is not so extensively represented as composer. I feel he works best with his own material.

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Liner Notes by Ira Gitler

“A young man ain’t nothing in this world these days,” indicts the blues that Mose Allison sings in his Back Country Suite. Young man Mose refutes this fact. Old man Mose, in this case, Mose John Allison Sr., a ragtime piano player in his youth, has remained in Tippo, Mississippi and is “farming right now,” according to his son.

Mose Jr. has been urbanized in many ways but his music has retained the backwoods flavor of “down home.” In his first albums, Back Country Suite (7091) and Local Color (7121), Mose devoted a side of each to descriptive remembrances of his native state. These served well to introduce his considerable abilities as a composer as well as player. The other sides of both LPs consisted of material by other writers and Allison originals, unrelated to his Southern sketches except by his general style.

Style is what Young Man Mose is concerned with for the most part; the Allison style in interpretation of standard tunes. In Mose’s words, “They’re tunes that haven’t been played to death and have interesting changes for me, to play on.”

Mose plays in a completely individual combination of old and new jazz elements. Among the pianists he admires are George Wallington, Al Haig and Thelonious Monk. His trumpet is in a Harry Edisonish vein with older undertones and more modern overtones, while his soft-voiced, homey singing has been described by Bill Coss of Metronome as “somewhere between Hoagy Carmichael and Trummy Young”.

Mose swings along in a lazy, relaxed manner on Somebody Else Is Taking My Place. Addison Farmer has a tuneful, plucked solo. Mose says of the song, “Everybody knows it but it doesn’t get played much anymore.”

Don’t Get Around Much Anymore, the Ellington tune which was called Never No Lament before words were added, is a good example of the application of Mose’s blues style, both in singing and piano solo, to a song that we have heard done by many different people.

Another oldie that hasn’t been done much lately (Charlie Mariano is the only modernist I can think of who has recorded it) is Bye Bye Blues. This is a happy, up-tempo performance — music for smiling. In addition to his solo, Mose engages Nick Stabulas in eight and four bar exchanges.

Mose has had an affection for How Long Has This Been Going On? ever since hearing Al Cohn’s, early Fifties’ recording. His quiet, reflective personal approach suits this Gershwin very well. Farmer has a bridge’s worth of solo.

In 1947, a trio called the Soft Winds, the members being Herb Ellis, John Frigo and Lou Carter, wrote a tune called I Told Ya I Love Ya, Now Get Out. In this instrumental version, Mose felt it with Latin rhythm at beginning and end with 4/4 for the improvising in between. He plays a sprightly single-line solo and then employs charging chords in his interplay with Stabulas.

Baby, Let Me Hold Your Hand, which opens side two, is a blues which Mose heard Ray Charles do around 1951. His simple, plaintive vocal is complemented by a dividing piano solo. Stabulas makes the back beat heard.

Stroll, the only Allison composition of the album, is a vehicle for Mose’s muted trumpet. Strolling is playing against a background of bass and drums. With Mose away from the piano, naturally, a stroll is dictated. Farmer has a solo, too, in this engaging promenade.

Ray Noble’s I Hadn’t Anyone Till You is vocalized intimately by Mose who adds a short solo in the middle.

The first recording, in quite a while, of My Kinda Love, a song which some of you may remember as sung by Sarah Vaughan in the Forties, is treated here in a solidly grooving instrumental version. Mose and Nick trade “fours” before the last chorus and the drummer handles the bridge in that one.

Sleepy Time Gal is a song that “my mother used to sing a lot,” Mose remembers. Here he just plays it in subdued, understated fashion with solos by Mose and Addison. Mose’s style is well summed up in this one and reminds me of an anecdote which he tells on himself.

It was at a jam session with a lot of horn blowers and someone remarked, “After all the Cadillacs have run off the road, Mose comes along in his rattle-trap.” Mose grinned as he told me the story, “You know, not flashy but it will get you there in a pinch.”

About the players …

Mose Allison was born in Tippo, Mississippi in 1927. He studied piano for five years during grammar school and soaked up country blues via phonograph records. In high school he became interested in jazz and added trumpet to his means of expression. Mose attended the University of Mississippi and later got his B.A. in English at Louisiana State after serving in the Army. He has been in New York on a permanent basis since 1957 and has done the bulk of his playing with Stan Getz, Zoot Sims and Al Cohn.

Addison Farmer was born in Council Bluffs, lowa in 1928. Before coming to New York in 1954, he was active in California with Jay McShann, Howard McGhee and Benny Carter. In New York, he has worked with the Art Farmer-Gigi Gryce combo, Teddy Charles and Stan Getz, among others, and has studied at both Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music. Addison likes Pettiford, Ray Brown and Percy Heath on bass.

Nick Stabulas was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. in 1929. He studied with Henry Adler from 1946-48 and was first heard in jazz circles at the Open Door sessions in Greenwich Village in 1954. Since then, he has played, most often with Phil Woods, Sims-Cohn and George Wallington. Nick’s preferred drummers are Roach, Clarke and Blakey.