Search - Mose Allison :: Sage of Tippo

No such thing as too much of a good thing

Eric C. Sedensky | Madison, AL, US | 02/03/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I don't know why one doesn't hear more about musicians like Mose Allison. Here's a guy who's been around for years, always making interesting and high-quality music, yet until I picked up PJG, I didn't know who he was. (Okay, so maybe I don't get out as much as I would like...) The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings: Ninth Editionlists Allison's "The Word from Mose" as one of its core collection recordings, but on this set, you get everything from that phenomenal work, plus three more LP's worth of material. And man, this stuff is the bee's knees, I'm telling you! Mose is the quintessential blues man, taking simple songs and simple words and making the feelings - bitterness, disappointment, surprise - come out. He intersperses all his recordings with a few instrumentals to give him a chance or two to focus on his crisp, swinging piano playing. He's not the world's best singer, but he stays within his limitations so that when he's putting together one of his clever iambic pentameter (see Bernstein Century: Bernstein on Jazz - What is Jazz?) lamenting riffs over a standard twelve-bar blues, he's really at his best. The price of this 2-CD set is only a little more than for a single CD, yet it contains four times as much music, so believe me when I say, whether you have or haven't heard of him and his music before, if you like jazz and blues, you can never have too much of Mose Allison. Buy more, save more, be "more happy".

"