Mose Allison Quotes

Jazz is an interesting music. It's one of the few forms of music where everyone that's performing the music has a creative stake in the music. In jazz, everyone's improvising, and everyone's creating at the same time.

There's an awful lot of resources that can be drawn upon in an improvised music concert.

You're just sort of searching for this 'thing' and sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't. All music is imperfect, but in jazz since you're improvising, at least the way I play, I'm trying to follow my train of thought in a solo.

I play patterns. I'll make up a pattern and just play it.

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.

I don't read music. I don't write it. So I wander around on the guitar until something starts to present itself.

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there's no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

I may play the same songs night to night, but I never play them the same way.

You don't rehearse jazz to death to get the camera angles.

I always felt of myself as a composer, performer, improviser. I've never called myself a jazz man. I make art.

I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music.

We're all about trying to play better every night, not just singing hit songs ... we ad lib, and every night there's jamming .. it's almost like the Grateful Dead meets Buck Owens some nights, because we'll go off on little adventures and sometimes we do crash the bus!.

I think that music, or at least the kind of music that I make, benefits greatly from improvisation.

Jazz today, as always in the past, is a matter of thoughtful creation, not mere unaided instinct.

I play music - I write my own music, but I play music, just background music really, and just let it happen.

You have to react to what's around you in the moment, whatever the music is. Just think of it as some place you have to enter and you need to find the key.

We all do 'do, re, mi,' but you have got to find the other notes yourself.

Music is a lot more like solving an intricate puzzle with moments of pure, random creative bliss... whereas painting is much more purely random creative bliss with moments of problem solving.

When I was a kid, I wrote music - from the age of 11 until the age of 18.

See, there were certain rules I'd always used, and people like Trane, they would break those rules.

The guitar for me is a translation device. It's not a goal. And in some ways, jazz isn't a destination for me. For me, jazz is a vehicle that takes you to the true destination - a musical one that describes all kinds of stuff about the human condition and the way music works.

Nothing pleases me more than to go into a room and come out with a piece of music.

My intentions have been, and are always, to just really get behind what my ideas are musically and to just ride this thing out, cause it feels good, and I think for the most part it's good music. Even when it's not, I'd like to still search for something that could be even like a little bit mind-blowing or shocking to me.

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

I don't tend to set out on huge world domination goals or have anything in mind. I just like to play. I like to gig a lot; I like to write music.