Mose Allison

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

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

There's a few tunes of mine that don't have jokes, but most of them have a joke and they have a humorous point of view somewhere.

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

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

So I'm in my 51st year of playin' mostly nightclubs. I do some concerts.

Louis Jordan, I always liked him as well.

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

I've been able to do pretty well. I don't work as many consecutive nights as I used to, but I'm still working over 100 nights a year, so that's good for me.

I'm pretty much self-centered in that way. I don't try to predict what's gonna happen to jazz or anything like that. Nobody knows what jazz.

I'm always storing away phrases and ideas and things that I think might turn into songs.

I just have a lot off different influences.

I have no idea what I'm doin'. I've never seen me.

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

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

And Lennie Tristano I like a lot, I still like him.

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

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

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.

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.

I've heard some tunes in recent years that were pretty close to that same idea. The idea was you turn on the radio and you want to hear some music and up comes a commercial.

I'm playin' the music I like.

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

At this point, I don't listen to other people too much. I'm not really that affected by anyone.