Who is mose allison

He arrived in New York in , where he received encouragement, work, and even a recording date as a sideman for saxophonist Al Cohn. In he secured his own recording contract with Prestige Records. His debut outing, Back Country Suite in , was a collection of self-composed, largely instrumental pieces evoking his impressions of the Mississippi Delta and a handful of jazz standards; it was released to unanimous critical acclaim and has since become a classic, largely due to the appearance of the song "Back Country Suite: Blues," eventually known as "Young Man Blues.

Allison released three albums in , Young Man Mose , Creek Bank , and Local Color the last was comprised, almost exclusively, of his own songs, including the now-standard "Parchman Farm". After releasing 's Autumn Songs he left the label to sign with Columbia, where he released Transfiguration of Hiram Brown in , which featured an eight-part vocal and instrumental suite combining Delta blues and dazzling hard bop originals over a handful of standards. His final album for Columbia appeared on its Epic imprint: 's Takes to the Hills included new compositions as well as unissued material from his previous two outings.

In mid, Allison was invited to a meeting with Nesuhi Ertegun of Atlantic Records; after just ten minutes, he signed a recording contract. His relationship with Ertegun was one Allison prized; he felt as if he had encountered a record business executive who got what he was trying to do. A steady string of well-received trio outings arrived over the next few years including 's The Word from Mose 's Wild Man on the Loose and Mose Alive!

Allison spent much of his tenure at Atlantic supervised and produced personally by Ertegun , whom he considered a good friend. Allison took it in stride for a time, working with Dorn on 's stellar Western Man his first to employ a Fender Rhodes piano on some selections leading a rhythm section that included electric bassist Chuck Rainey and soon-to-be Mahavishnu Orchestra drummer Billy Cobham.

Allison self-produced the widely acclaimed live outing Mose in Your Ear. Already discouraged due to the demise of his working partnership with Ertegun , he toured almost constantly from to His last album for the label was 's Your Mind Is on Vacation.

It included re-recordings of many of his best-known tunes with a top-shelf cast of players that included drummer Jerry Granelli and bassist Jack Hannah , saxophonists Al Cohn , Joe Farrell , and David Sanborn. Allison began spending more time on the road playing in Europe and Japan.

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Of London. Mose continues to write and perform all over the world. During a recent London engagement, Time Out, the major entertainment weekly, praised Mose:. I on Blue Note Records. A gifted natural improviser, he was also attracted to the trumpet by the music of Louis Armstrong , studying the instrument in high school and performing with it in local marching bands and dance bands.

He pulled out of full-time education a second time, to take a six-nights-a-week job playing piano and singing in a cocktail lounge near Lake Charles, Indiana, then moved to Louisiana State University to study English and philosophy, graduating in He began working all over the south-east and as far north as Denver, then went to New York to sample the frenetic modern jazz and bebop scene in He played piano with the saxists Stan Getz, Zoot Sims and Gerry Mulligan , but the invigorating New York scene encouraged him to draw together all the disparate influences in his musical sensibilities: the relaxed swing piano of Nat King Cole and Erroll Garner , the various angles on bebop adopted by Thelonious Monk, John Lewis and Al Haig, and, of course, the distant childhood sounds of the blues singers.

Like Miles Davis in the same period, Allison was finding that bop could become a mechanical, formulaic exercise, and he was looking for something else. But he still saw himself as a pianist at least as much as a singer in this period, continuing to work with Getz intermittently — including a month-long engagement at the Montmartre club, Copenhagen, where the two performed as a duo.