Mose Allison Quotes

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.

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

Everybody cryin' mercy / When they don't know the meaning of the word.

The things that really matter don't mix with idle chatter.

Ever since the world ended, I don't go out as much

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm happy whenever anybody does my material. I don't care what they do with it. I do what I want to with other people's songs.

I never thought I was playing black music. I was just playing music, the stuff I liked. I sang blues at parties and things when I was a kid.

I never bothered about keeping track.Every now and then someone records one of my songs, and I get credit for it.

I told [my daughter Amy] at an early age that she had a good ear. But I didn't influence her music much. She's pretty much developed her style on her own, and she's a talented songwriter.

I'm not inspired by songwriting at all; that took place years ago. I'm pretty well established, as far as my influences go. I don't listen to music anymore. It all sounds the same to me.

I didn't feel anything [frustraiting]. I just kept working 110 or 120 nights a year.

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

I'm playin' the music I like.

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.

My dad was a self-taught stride piano player. The myth is - I don't whether it's true or not - that he taught himself to play by watching a player piano.

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

I don't care what anyone does, as long as they go through the copyright office.

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

I was taking chemical engineering. But I went into the army after that. When I came out of the army, I was a different person. I met a lot of good jazz players in the army.

[The producer told me:] "We can try one more record, and we'll see how that one does." Those records never did anything. My music never got mentioned. My color got mentioned.

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

I just have a lot off different influences.

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

The idea was I'd never amount to anything in music, The theme there was that I was talented, but I wouldn't work hard enough to do anything with it.

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.