81 Quotes by Mose Allison

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

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 don’t sit down to write a song; they just come to me from something that somebody says, or something in the news. The punchline comes to me, and I go over it in my head and get the song form. I hadn’t been doing that a lot.

I started going to a piano teacher at 5 years old, but pretty soon I started picking things out on my own and stopped taking music lessons. I never could read music very well, but I’ve still been doing it.

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

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

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

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.