Explore Quotes by Mose Allison

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 just have a lot off different influences.