Key to the Highway: December 2017

Key to the Highway

2017-12-13 2-5pm

Luther Allison

Mose Allison (Blues side)
John Handy

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Now that the body of this blog is complete, I’d like to comment on a couple of things I heard on the news tonight. First off, I was sorry to hear about the passing of San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee. I like to keep myself aware politically but not so much for San Francisco, so it’s not surprising that I cannot recall negatively anything that a Democrat had done, but by that same standard I think it proves that he must have been a damn good guy.

But kudos must go out to the people of Alabama for proving that more of them had a moral conscience than I expected. Still, failed Senatorial candidate and general asshole (pardon my language) Roy Moore told his Christian base that he would leave it to God rather than concede to Doug Jones. Senate score: 51 to 49, so if only two Republican Senators of conscience can stand up against Trump’s moronic policies, we can keep Mike Pence from being allowed a vote on upcoming bills. Congratulations and thanks to Alabama.

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I had a music teacher at my high school that was somewhat of a radical. He was Latino but with an Italian last name so he said he didn’t have to go through a lot of the crap that others did, like being accepted for renting a living space, but he was very much into the Venceramos Brigade (I hope I spelled that right) and he tried to convince us of things like, if you are going to really try to make a change then don’t do drugs because that’s an easy way for “the man” to put you in jail and out of circulation. He probably had an influence on my thinking at age seventeen that if the goal was worthwhile (ending the Viet Nam war, for instance) it did justify the means. This comes to mind for two reasons. One, I just finished watching the ten part Ken Burns documentary on the Viet Nam war over about a two month period. I found it difficult to remember the death and destruction from an unjustified action that we ultimately just bailed on anyway, so I put close to a week between episodes, but mostly because I read an article in the Atlantic magazine about Antifa and the development of left wing anarchy in America. While I find it commendable that these mostly youthful people care enough to express a sense of moral correctness, I no longer agree with the ends / means ideas I held in my youth and am glad that I never acted on them as they appear to be doing, instead limiting myself to peaceful though rowdy protests at the Oakland draft board or getting mace sprayed while in the back of an open camper shell by a few Berkeley cops as they speedily passed us on the road. That was the same weekend that I threw my draft card at a National Guardsman. But had I done anything more destructive I don’t know how I could have dealt with it in later life. I hope today’s Antifa kids will figure this out pretty soon as well.
Anyway, my music teacher was a trumpet player and he had played with alto saxophone player John Handy, so pretty soon I familiarized myself with his his 1968 LP Projections, which is in my collection but is too scratched up for airplay so I recently picked up a CD of two of his later albums which will be the source for most of one long set we will hear in the middle of today’s show.
So, John Handy being the first artist picked for today’s airing, I figured I needed a good strong Blues guitarist for balance, and who is stronger in my mind than Luther Allison? That accomplished, I considered the relatively quiet, peaceful Blues side of Mose Allison (no relation; they are different as black and white) to complement them both. Okay, no more 1967 political babble, let’s just move on to their individual stories.

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Since I’ll be writing essays on both of today’s other artists, I will again forgo writing a full biography of Luther Allison until I can do him justice (besides, I can only do right by one Allison per show) and just discuss the music presented today. We’ve already heard Luther’s music a couple of times recently, once at the end of May, as we were getting ready for this year’s Blues marathon, we presented Luther’s Motown recordings from 1972-1975 along with a couple of live songs from the Ann Arbor Blues Festival within that time span. I had forgotten that, at the end of March, we also played stuff from his earliest released recordings from about 1968 released on Delmark plus an even earlier session that sat in somebody’s closet until a decade or so ago. I mention these since some of you might want to go back in the blog’s archives and read what I wrote then, because everything I write is well worth reading more than once!
Well, Luther was disappointed that his Motown stuff didn’t work out commercially and he found a new home in Paris, where he recorded a handful of albums on European labels, mostly not quite up to snuff. Still, Luther was as popular a draw in Europe as he had been around Chicago before his departure. I was often asking people whatever became of Luther Allison and then, in 1994, he released Soul Fixin’ Man on the Alligator label and this nation’s record buying public found out about this almost forgotten star. This would be followed in 1995 by Blue Streak and in 1997 by Reckless, all of which brought him much acclaim including being chosen in back to back years the Artist of the Year by the W.C. Handy Awards.
Although his voice had lost a little bit of that youthful timbre, Luther had become the consummate showman by the time he returned to recording for an American label, which you might be able to hear on the live sets you hear today. After Luther passed away, Alligator gathered together three live concerts and put them out in a double CD titled Live in Chicago. The first disc is mostly from June 3^rd 1995 at the Chicago Blues Festival and our two sets play all of its contents except one ten minute tune where Luther steps up to join Otis Rush for the days finale. This includes the one tune (Give Me Back My Wig) which is credited as part of the show at Buddy Guy’s Legends club which is well represented on the second disc. For each of the concerts, Luther chose the band of guitarist / friend James Solberg (different drummers at the other concerts, but here Robb Stupka, alongside bassist Ken Faltinson and keyboardist Mike Vlahakis) to back him up, as was the case whenever he came Stateside, including the one time I was fortunate enough to hear him at Moe’s Alley. In addition to disc 2, I have at least three more live Luther CDs, so it’ll be awhile before we run out of his material.

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Mose Allison was born on November 11^th 1927 on his grandfather’s farm in Tippo, Mississippi, a cotton growing region of the Delta, where his father, Mose John Allison Sr., ran a large farm and a retail dry goods store. His mother, Maxine, taught grammar school and, once young Mose had heard Boogie Woogie, signed him up for piano lessons at the age of five. His father had been a ragtime piano player, and Mose stuck with the lessons for five years, learning “just enough piano to be able to carry my ideas”. He took up trumpet for a brief time in high school, then determined that “the trumpet is the sixth to be hired, the piano is the first”.
Not long after he began his piano classes, Mose started hearing the three great Boogie pianists Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, and Pete Johnson on the radio. Other influences he acknowledged were Fats Waller, Nat “King” Cole and Louis Armstrong and Louis Jordan as well as Percy Mayfield, often called the Poet Laureate of the Blues.
Mose attended the University of Mississippi in 1945, then served in the Army in 1946 and 1947, going on to Louisiana State University where he graduated in 1952 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and a minor in Philosophy, during all of which he performed either as a sideman or heading up his own trio. Upon his discharge from the Army, his own combo played the Louisiana / Texas circuit, some seedy joints. “I guess I was what you could call a honky tonk piano player with aspirations.” He was exposed to a lot of Blues, artists like Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, B.B. King, Bull Moose Jackson and Joe Houston, leading him to reflect, “I didn’t have to buy Blues records because there was so much of it around in person”.
He met Audre Mae, a St. Louis woman, in 1948 while playing a gig in Missouri and married her three years later. They would have four children, Alissa (born in 1954), Amy (1958, and also a musician), and twins John and Janine in 1959.
Mose took leave from his Southern gigging in the summer of 1951 to check out the New York music scene, but returned disappointed to finish his education. “There was no work, actually . . . people you’d been reading about in Down Beat for years, you’d see them on the corner looking for a handout.” He would return in 1956 with his family.
“I played around the Southwest and other places for years and the basic elements of my style were pretty well complete when I got to New York.” After initial difficulties, the first to hire Mose was Al Cohn into the group he co-led with fellow tenor sax player Zoot Sims. “Al was the first to get me any meaningful work in New York. My first recording date was with him.” Wikipedia lists that Mose released four LPs with Cohn:
The Al Cohn Quintet Featuring Bobby Brookmeyer (Coral CRL-57118, 1956)

Al and Zoot: Al Cohn Quintet Featuring Zoot Sims (Coral CRL-57171, 1957)

Jazz Alive! A Night at the Half Note, with Zoot Sims (United Artists UAL-4040/UAS-5040, 1959)
Either Way, with Zoot Sims and Cecil "Kid Haffey" Collier (vocals on three of the eight tracks) (Fred Miles Presents FM-1, 1961; Zim ZMS-2002, 1976)

Mose also gigged with groups headed by Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, and Stan Getz (recording in 1957 on Getz’ The Soft Swing) and going to afterhours clubs like Birdland, the Jazz Gallery, the Half Note, and the Village Gate.
1957 also saw the release of Mose’s first session as bandleader, Back Country Suite for Piano, Bass and Drums, the first of six Prestige albums recorded at engineer Rudy Van Gelder’s Hackensack, New Jersey studio. For this trio he chose bassist Taylor LaFargue, who had played with him in the South, and local drummer Frank Isola. This initial outing was almost entirely instrumental, containing only two vocals on the eleven tracks, but The Who released one, Young Man Blues, on their 1970 Live at Leeds album for which he received a $5,000 royalty check. “I never got a check for that much money. I thought, Man, this must be a mistake.” He even returned to playing the trumpet on one tune each from his next two albums (Trouble in Mind from Local Color and Stroll from Young Man Mose, both LPs released in 1958) before his doctor made him set the instrument down after an ear operation.
Local Color included Parchman Farm, his most requested tune for two decades until he deemed it politically incorrect. “I no longer do what I refer to as the ‘cotton sack’ songs. Those songs strictly based on and limited to that Southern sharecropper era – Parchman Farm, One-Room Country Shack, Eyesight to the Blind – I’ve discontinued those. They’re just not relevant to the way things are going today.” The tune was recorded by John Mayall and even Blue Cheer on their debut album. This early in his career, Mose had a plan B in case music proved too weak a livelihood; he said the literary quarterlies were “encouraging in their comments” about his short stories.
Prestige recorded three more albums, in 1958 both Ramblin’ with Mose (not released until 1962) and Creek Bank and in 1959 Autumn Songs. All received mostly decent reviews, sold sufficiently and brought enough fans to his gigs, but after Autumn Songs, Down Beat’s John F. Wilson found him “a strangely monotonous performer whose pieces have an abrupt, unfinished quality in addition to a steady sameness of texture”. On all but the very first Prestige release, Mose used trumpeter Art Farmer’s lesser known identical twin brother Addison, feeling that he was “one of my favorite bass players of all time”, and either Nick Stabulas or Ronnie Free on drums. Farmer also appeared on both of the LPs Mose recorded in 1960 for Columbia, Transfiguration of Hiram Brown (“It sold about ten records, I think”) and I Love the Life I Live, but passed away unexpectedly in February 1963. All six Prestige LPs plus I Love the Life I Live can be picked up on the 4CD set Mose Allison: 7 Classic Albums on the Real Gone label but be prepared, the documentation is minimal with all discs I have seen from this company. Better keep this Blog! I just picked up the set and I understand it is a high percentage of instrumentals so it is likely we will return for at least one more Mose presentation, but will it be Jazz or Blues?
Mose left Prestige because, “I was getting $250 an album, I wasn’t selling many records and I wasn’t getting any royalties”. He moved on from Columbia (two albums, The Transfiguration of Hiram Brown and I Love the Life I Live, both recorded in 1960) because, “They kept sending me all this Gene Autry material. They wanted to make a pop singer out of me.” and, even though it was a lucrative contract, “I might as well get some satisfaction out of what I’m doing, because you don’t know if you’ll ever make any money out of doing it.” He then recorded Take to the Hills (later re-issued as V-8 Ford Blues) for Epic in 1961 before he signed on with Atlantic. Prestige released Mose Allison Sings in 1963, a compilation of previously recorded vocal numbers.
Mose found a home when he went to Atlantic, where he would stay for fourteen years and ten albums. A lot of Mose’s comfortability was due to his direct dealings with Nesuhi Ertegun, along with his brother Ahmet a co-founder of Atlantic Records. Allison claimed to have signed all the documents in just ten minutes of Ertegun’s presence and it was not until Atlantic became more successful and Nesuhi was unable to put in as much time on Mose’s projects that he decided to leave.
Mose’s first album for Atlantic, recorded in March of 1962, was similar to his earlier releases, a trio format with Farmer holding down the bass and Osie Johnson behind the drum kit. The title track, I Don’t Worry About a Thing, was played on our airing of the Jazz side of Mose, and today we hear my favorite set of his lyrics in Your Mind is on Vacation.
Mose expanded his backing for 1963’s Swingin’ Machine, again featuring Farmer on bass but this time with Frankie Dunlop (from Thelonius Monk’s quartet) on drums, but also trombonist Jimmy Knepper, oftentimes a Charles Mingus sideman, and Jimmy Reider on tenor sax. Although Mose would occasionally go for a bigger sound, he really preferred the trio setting. “It’s a more basic, delicate sound. There’s a light quality about it. Also, I never had the temperament for being a bandleader, and I don’t much like the idea of escorting people around the country.”
Back to a trio for 1964’s The Word from Mose, he presented eleven (original?) vocal tunes. Probably the first contact I had with Mose’s music was through the Yardbirds’ rendition of I’m Not Talking, the original coming from this album. He followed it up with Wild Man on the Loose (1965), Mose Alive! Recorded Live at the Lighthouse (also 1965), then holding off until 1968 for I’ve Been Doin’ Some Thinkin’ (both Bonnie Raitt and Elvis Costello would remake Everybody Cryin Mercy) and then 1970 for Hello There, Universe.
For 1971’s Western Man, Mose played an electric piano, something he wouldn’t do again until 1982 for the album Middle Class White Boy. “I like the electric piano’s sound as a change from the acoustic sound. It’s more legato and flowing – sort of a cross between vibes and harpsichord. But if it had to be one or the other, it would have to be the acoustic piano.”
Mose’s last new music release for Atlantic was a live session recorded in 1972 right here in Palo Alto at the club In Your Ear, hence the title Mose in Your Ear. He went into the studio one last time for the label in 1976 to create the album Your Mind is on Vacation, a remake of half a dozen (maybe more) of his earlier numbers. “When I originally recorded these tunes, in some cases it was the first time I had performed them. After playing them for years, you get different ideas about how they should be approached.” He added horns from the five that were previously done as a trio and recorded Swingin’ Machine without them. In the horn section was the youthful David Sanborn on alto, and old friend Al Cohn added his tenor sax to two of the tracks. All of the Atlantic albums have been reissued as CDs on Collectables except this last one, which was made available on Koch.
Mose’s departure from Atlantic was amicable and mutual. “They kept suggesting I do something more commercial. They even wanted me to do a Disco album! So I just waited a few years and didn’t go back into the studio. It didn’t bother my work schedule – I was still getting booked 160-170 nights a year.”
Mose played a three week residency at Ronnie Scott’s in London in 1974, during which he told Melody Maker’s Stan Britt, “When I started out in my efforts to improve the work of my left hand, I found out that listening to piano sonatas by the classical players helped me enormously. You can see what the composer is trying to do and how the keyboard exponents have to integrate both hands. Actually, I’ve done it all by ear. I don’t have a legitimate technique at all – the classical-type runs, arpeggios, and all that are completely beyond me. I just figure out what I can do for myself.”
In addition to an appreciation for the music of the past, Mose was also almost prescient in his view of the future. “There doesn’t seem to be any excitement about Jazz. Nobody seems to know what direction to go . . . We have to redefine what Jazz is . . . Rock ‘n’ Roll is introducing everyone to the basics . . . It’s time for something in between far-out Jazz and basic Rock.” Fusion, anyone?

In 1979, Mose gave an interview to the New York Times music critic Robert Palmer, also a noted Blues historian. “Basically, my songs fit into categories. There’s the slapstick kind, like Your Mind is on Vacation, just fun, you know? Then there are what I call the public service songs, things like Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy, that I think people need to hear. Then the other category would be personal crisis songs; those help you pull out of bad slumps, or at least help you to deal with them.”
“A reviewer for some college station took me to task for recording What Do You Do After You Ruin Your Life. He said I shouldn’t even have written this song. But that was a very young person. I think most older people have felt this way one time or another, that they’ve blown it. We were sittin’ around one night debating the question, what do you do after you ruin your life? The moral answer is that you save somebody else’s. But the answer I like, this drummer said ‘You go and ruin somebody else’s.”
There was a 1978 live recording, Pure Mose, put out by 32 Jazz, but it wasn’t until 1982 that Mose returned to a recording studio, this time for Elektra / Musician’s Middle Class White Boy, the first of two albums he would cut for the label. Mose rarely played with a guitarist (“It clashes with me. There’s always a problem in voicing.”), but for this Los Angeles session he used Phil Upchurch. The second release was Lessons in Living (Recorded Live at the Montreux Jazz Festival, July 21, 1982), a long title but an excellent cast of characters, with Billy Cobham on drums and Jack Bruce’s bass laying down the bottom as alto saxist Lou Donaldson and guitarist Eric Gale played over them, providing more for Mose to work with. From the album cover notes, “by the time I was checked into a plush room with balcony overlooking Lake Geneva, I knew that I was in Jazz heaven (went to Jazz heaven, didn’t have to die).” I gotta hear that album!
Five years later, Mose was signed on to Blue Note and at least the first two albums, 1987’s Ever Since the World Ended and 1989’s My Backyard, were produced by Mose’s old friend Ben Sidran. Sidran had written the liner notes for Mose in Your Ear back in 1972. As Allison said, “We’ve been friends for years. I like to have him in the booth because I know I can trust him. He’s willing to listen to anything I have to say, and I’ll listen to anything he has to say.” Notable on the first album is guitarist Kenny Burrell. Of working with Mose, Sidran says, “He still retains a good deal of the deep-south shuffle in his rhythms. He is explicit, for example, in his instructions to drummers: no back beats and no hi-hat or cymbal on ‘2’ and ‘4’. What he’s after is a kind of free-form Xydeco groove.” (My Backyard was recorded in New Orleans, the first session Mose has done down south.) Sidran also spoke of the growth of Mose’s music. “It’s the same quality of focus, writing, playing, and humor. Maybe he’s gotten a little deeper, but not at the cost of the swing, the humor or the storyline.”
As he explained in a 1990 Goldmine interview, Mose’s talents in both Blues and Jazz have been a mixed blessing. “There’s a lot of places I don’t work because they’re confused about what I do.” More confusion came about early on when people just assumed he was black. Early on, Jet magazine wanted to do an interview with Allison. “”They asked me where I went to college, and I told them I graduated From Louisiana State. They said, ‘Were you the first black man to graduate from LSU?’ And I said, ‘Well, wait just a minute. I think there’s something you should know.’” And when he was once asked, “When you were stealing the black music, did you ever have any problem with that?”, but before he could get angry he decided to create our closing song, Ever Since I stole the Blues. “I realized that it was just too good an idea to throw away.”
Which reminds me of a story a friend of mine told me a few decades back. Before he came to California from New York State, he had one uncle who used to claim all the time that the family back in Italy was good friends with Dodgers catcher Roy Campanella’s family, did all kinds of things together and such ... until he saw a game on television. (clue for non-baseball fans: Campanella was black)
My information hereon is a little sparse as most of it has come from the liner notes to the excellent two disc compilation set Allison Wonderful, which was released in 1994 on Rhino, but its musical and documentary content runs out with the My Backyard LP. To show how highly I value it, we have presented almost all of its 47 tracks over this Blues show and the previously aired Jazz show. So comprehensive was its biographical data that I found almost nothing new in my All Music Guide to Jazz but Wikipedia provides us a more up to date album listing, which tells me that Allison’s connection to Blue Note was maintained through at least 2001, including 1993’s The Earth Wants You, 1996’s Gimcracks and Gewgaws and two volumes from 2001 of The Mose Chronicles: Live in London. He did step away in 1996 for one album on Verve, Tell Me Something: The Songs of Mose Allison, essentially a tribute album he recorded along with Van Morrison, Georgie Fame, and Ben Sidran. It also lists a 2010 session on Epitaph, The Way of the World, and the 2015 recording Mose Allison, American Legend – Live in California on the Ibis label. There are also about a dozen compilation albums.

Wikipedia is also often good with honors and award listings, here mentioning Mose’s 2006 induction into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame, a marker being placed on the Mississippi Blues Trail in 2012 near his birthplace in Tippo, and perhaps the highest honor a Jazzman can receive – being named a Jazz Master by the National Endowments for the Arts in a January 14^th 2013 ceremony at New York’s Lincoln Center. Mose was around to appreciate all these kudos before he passed from natural causes at his Hilton Head, South Carolina home on November 15^th 2016, leaving a legacy of about 150 songs.
In regards to playing a number for the thousandth time, Mose felt, “I’m glad to get a chance to play this tune again. And you know, it’s never the same twice . . . I don’t care if you’ve been doing it fifty years. You still can’t get up there and just sit there and it will happen. You’ve got to make it happen. People ask me how I want to be introduced. I say, introduce me as the man who’s in his 36^th year of on-the-job training.”

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After all the time it took to write the Mose essay, it appears I lied to you regarding John Handy and I’m just going to write a brief bit about what you will hear today. Besides, I just received a CD of Handy’s first releases as a bandleader (1959 and 1960) and have a later one on the way so anything I write at this time would likely be incomplete. We just had our annual KKUP staff Christmas party (I hope you guys all have a wonderful Christmas as well) and I was talking to one of my friends who does a Jazz show and when I mentioned I would be playing John Handy (not to be confused with Dixieland sax player Captain John Handy), his paraphrased response was “Just not Hard Work”. Okay, that burst my bubble. Thanks, Leo. But I can understand his point. The two album CD I have (along with Carnival) is more R&B related than his other stuff as I know it.
The two albums were recorded in 1976 & 1977, so It was late in the 70s when I kept hearing this semi-instrumental Hard Work being played on the bar jukeboxes, and when I walked over to see who was doing it, to my amazement, it was John Handy. Like I say, not the type of stuff I would have expected from him but certainly good enough to draw my attention, and plenty of others liked it enough to “drop the coin right into the slot”, as Chuck Berry once said. Today’s set is made up from that double-album CD except for Stormy Monday, taken from a 1989 disc Centerpiece, by John Handy and Class, which might have been an okay album if the three female violinists could have just played their instruments and kept their schmaltzy mouths shut. Still, an enjoyable set but I’m thinking his more solidly Jazzy stuff will make even better listening.
For the longest time, I’ve wanted to annually use the last show and / or maybe the first to present a best of the preceding year type of thing and I think that is what I will do, finally, in two weeks. Besides, there wouldn’t be much of a blog to write so maybe I’d be able to get ahead of the game going into the next year, except that I am such a procrastinator I really need a deadline to get me moving. Anyway, again, Merry Christmas to you all and, for everyone except Leo, ….. enjoy

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Since it is still relatively new, I thought I’d mention that KKUP is now streaming on the internet and, while it is still in a developing stage, we have been putting out the word. I’m not all of that good with high-tech stuff, but it seems pretty easy to access. If you go to our website at KKUP.org you will see on the home page a strip of options immediately above the pictures of the musicians the next to the last option being LISTEN ONLINE. By clicking this, it brings up a choice of desktop or mobile. I can only speak for the desktop but after maybe a minute I was receiving a crystal clear feed. As already mentioned, this is still a work in progress and we are currently limited to a finite number of listeners at any one time. I mention this so you will be aware to turn off the application when you are not actually listening. (I put the player in my favorites bar for the easiest of access.) Now we can reach our listeners in Los Gatos and Palo Alto, even my family in Canada. Let your friends elsewhere know they can now listen to your favorite station, and while they have the home page open they can check out our schedule.

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Soul Fixin’ Man
Cherry Red Wine
Move from the Hood
Bad Love
Luther Allison 28mins

Back Country Suite: Blues

(aka Young Man’s Blues)
Parchman Farm
If You Live
Seventh Son
Smashed (Live)
Eyesight to the Blind
Baby Please Don’t Go
Fool’s Paradise
V-8 Ford
Your Mind is on Vacation
Mose Allison 24mins

Hard Work

Blues for Mister Jordan
Stormy Monday
Young Enough to Dream
Love’s Rejoicing
Watch Your Money
Christina’s Little Song
Carnival
John Handy 49mins

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Big City
Give Me Back My Wig
It Hurts Me Too
Luther Allison 28mins

I’m Not Talkin’

I Don’t Worry About a Thing
Your Red Wagon
I Ain’t Got Nothing But the Blues
Fool Killer
Hey Good Looking
Lost Mind
I Love the Life I Live
That’s All Right
Ever Since I Stole the Blues
Mose Allison 27mins

Key to the Highway

December 26, 2017

December 13, 2017

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