Young Man

Way too many musicians seem to be recently falling like Autumn leaves.  I especially hate it when I have to go looking for recordings to add to my collection after the artist is gone.  I try to reassure myself that you cannot possibly be on top of all of music unless you have a much narrower focus than I do.  E.g., you might be able to be a full maestro (or at least far more a savant than I) on the topic of Cambodian Calypso.  I hope there is such a thing.  But it is impossible to be truly aware of more than a fraction of the fabulous composers and performers, actually.  I'm delighted to be schooled on at least several seminal recording artists every year these days.  This is one.

I knew the name Mose Allison, probably just because I am a music nut.  I could not have told you anything about him.  When I heard he'd died recently, with that first name and musical genre, I admit I assumed he was an Afro-American.  From the description of his music in his obit, I needed to know more.  Finding he was from Louisiana and for a spell did college with the idea of Chemical Engineering of course intrigued me even more.  I had made a point of finding a music room where I could (as it happens, fruitlessly) tootle with my trombone while studying Chem E.

This guy could both compose and play, with a distinctive style.  And other musicians definitely picked up on that.  I had already bookmarked a couple YouTubes to illustrate my first remarkable finding on that score when I ran across an actual semi-professional blog post on the same score, although it pretended to be about Hulk Hogan.

But, for the record, I give you Mose and the Who:

Mr. Allison

The Who

For extra credit, here is what most of us probably have embedded from Live at Leeds