Old man blues

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Old man blues
April 16, 2010
by Bernard Perusse
The Vancouver Sun

To put it politely, a few eyebrows must have arched skyward when a white boy, playing trumpet, sat in with B.B. King's band.

After all, this was Beale Street in Memphis, Tenn., in the 1940s. Social and musical segregation was still a reality in the southern United States.

"That's what they tell me, but I didn't bother about that. I just did what I liked," Mose Allison said during a recent interview. "Nobody said anything to me about segregation or anything."

Allison, of course, was that white trumpet player. He later returned to piano, which he had played since his childhood, and became a jazz and blues giant with cool, deadpan numbers like "Parchman Farm" and "Your Mind Is On Vacation." A generation of British rockers, including Pete Townshend, Van Morrison, Georgie Fame, Paul Jones and Ray Davies still sings Allison's praises. Rightly so, since it's not hard to find the Mississippi-born musician's touch in their music.

Allison is 82 now. He has an easy laugh and is as witty in conversation as you'd expect. He keeps fit by running on the beach a couple of times a week, as he has done for more than 40 years. Allison's new disc, The Way of the World, is his first in 12 years. Produced by Joe Henry, it's funny, loose and inspiring -- a wonderful addition to his oeuvre, which goes back to 1957.

That year saw the release of his first album, Back Country Suite, recorded a year after he arrived in New York City. It was only with that move, he said, that he became conscious of race.

"Everybody was telling me that I couldn't do what I was doing because I was a white, Southern country boy who went to college. Nobody thought I could sing the blues," he said.

Back Country Suite and stints with the likes of Stan Getz, Al Cohn, Zoot Sims and Gerry Mulligan settled the credibility issue. Allison's unique world view -- literate and humorous rather than gritty and primal -- soon helped him carve out a special niche.

Asked whether a degree in English and philosophy from Louisiana State University had an impact on his writing, Allison paused and thought it over. An esthetics course, he finally said, might have helped him understand the artistic merit of the music he had loved since he learned to play boogie-woogie at the age of five on his grandfather's piano.

To this day, he said, he simply "picks things out by ear," and doesn't read music.

European audiences in the 1960s didn't need scholarly prompting to embrace Allison's music in a way his native country didn't. It's the oft-told story of many American jazz and blues artists who only realized how much their music meant to people when they crossed the ocean.

"Definitely, man," Allison said when asked if that's the way he saw it. "White people didn't pick up on the blues until the Beatles and other British groups started coming over here.

"Everything in the U.S.A. is money and sales," he said. "I never made anybody a lot of money, so that's why I was never considered important here. The British don't worry about that. They're completely outside that. They just go by what they like, which is what I always did. The British rockers saved me, because they got me a lot of young listeners."

If one particular group of Brits really made a difference to Allison's profile and bank account, it was The Who. Their raucous 1970 cover of Allison's "Young Man Blues" was on their ever-popular and often-reissued Live at Leeds album. "I made more money out of that than anything else I've done," Allison said.

Allison acknowledged the debt by appearing at a Carnegie Hall tribute to The Who last month. He sang both "Young Man Blues" and its 1998 update, "Old Man Blues."

Covering similar territory on the song "My Brain," on the new album, Allison pokes gentle fun at senior citizenship. While Allison admits to having trouble staying focused sometimes, his sense of humour proves to be in fighting form on "Modest Proposal," a tongue-in-cheek plea to give God and man a vacation from organized religion.

"Everywhere you go in the world where people are killing one another deliberately, there's usually a religious element," Allison said. "I figured that's one of the problems of the world."

The song title, Allison explained, comes from Jonathan Swift's 1729 satirical essay, in which he suggested that the Irish people facing famine eat children. "He knew that nobody was going to do that and I know that nobody's going to do anything about my song," he said.

His wit shows how little else has changed in the last half-century about the way Allison looks at the world. Asked to identify the most important thing he has learned during his decades in the music business, he didn't miss a beat.

"I haven't learned anything," he said, laughing. "I'm still wondering what I do."

The Way of the World is in stores now.

Mose Allison plays Vancouver July 26.