Mose Allison – 1927- 2016

He sat close to the keyboard, undemonstrative, the piano phrases clipped and succinct, the motion often crab-like but jaunty. He'd announce a song, perhaps a new one, play it and move on, keeping talk to the minimum, usually with just bass and drums for company. The set done, he didn't linger. Of course it was those songs that mattered, mostly self-composed and often wry, witty too, his beady eye cast on the bizarre ways of the world. He was unique.

Mose was born deep down in blues country, in Tippo, Mississippi, in 1927 and grew up aware of down-home blues and black music but was also hip to the smoother stylings of Nat King Cole and liked Dixieland too. After graduating he moved to New York and fell in with the likes of Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, playing boppish jazz piano around the clubs, touring and recording with Stan Getz, and made good. It took the interest stirred by Back Country Suite, his song cycle recorded in 1957 for Prestige to set him on another and altogether different path.

He no longer played for others but for himself, with a trio, recording most notably for Atlantic and travelling widely, sometimes picking up local support but always delighting listeners with that softly-stated, blues-inflected nasal vocal style and innate feeling for swing. Fellow artists like Georgie Fame and Van Morrison [for whom he opened] knew his worth, as did some of our blues-rockers, often covering his songs which just kept coming, like 'Parchman Farm', 'Your Mind is on Vacation', 'Everybody's Cryin' Mercy', 'Middle Class White Boy' and most tellingly, as he grew older, 'Certified Senior Citizen'. Mose Allison died on 15 November at home in Hilton Head, South Carolina. He was 89.

– Peter Vacher

– Photo by Tim Dickeson