Quotes from Mose Allison

The thing of playin' and singin' never bothered me.

I never sit down and write. I just sorta let things form in my brain.

Then I started listenin' a lot to classical composers. Piano works. Just to see what they were doin'. That sort of put me in a different groove to try to blend all that in.

A young man ain't nothin' in the world these days

I'm playin' music for a certain type of person. Fortunately, there are more and more of us. At least there are more comin' to see me than there were 30 years ago or so.

I just try to do as good job with the material as I can and play some jazz as well, some improvised music, and do that every night. Just see where it goes.

I do some concerts. At the moment, I'm being helped a lot by a gig I play in London, which is Pizza Express.

I went through the whole number, you know. The swing era, the boogie woogie era, the bebop era. Thelonious Monk is still one of my favorites. So a lot of these people had their effect on me.

As far as I'm concerned, the essentials of jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing, and instrumental personality.

Traveling these days has a lot of problems and also it wears you out more.

I been getting good crowds. It only took 50 years.

Pizza Express has been a real godsend for me. I've been working there for several years, six weeks a year. You can go to work every night and play. It's a nice little club. It's just about the right size for me, about 150 people.

I do very few standards. Hardly any. Other people's tunes that I do are usually obscure tunes, for the most part, although I do a couple of Duke Ellington tunes that are well known.

But I got an audience that knows what I do. They usually show up, so I usually do pretty good.

There's a lot of terrible things goin' on all the time, but you gotta try and have some fun in the end.

I finally decided if I was going to make a living, I was gonna have to come to New York.

I haven't stopped and I don't plan on stoppin' any time soon.

It's as much fun as it ever was, you know, once I get there. Gettin' there is a little harder.

I'm improvising all the time. Everything I do is improvised. On the piano, at least.

The jazz boom was goin' on then so there was a lot happenin' in New York at that time.

I just have a lot off different influences.

I sang and wrote songs when I was 12 years old.

All the classic jazz players all sang and a lot of 'em sang blues.

I can't judge my own stuff. That's for others. But those are the three things that I admire.