Mose Allison Quotes

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.

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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.

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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My main influences have always been the classic jazz players who sang, like Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole and Jack Teagarden.

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

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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.

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

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

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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.

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These people that think I'm cynical, I wish they'd come to see my shows these days because I've turned into a comedian, practically.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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