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Robin Lynam

FROM THE VAULT: 1982

Mose Allison

Lessons in Living (Live)

(Elektra)

On July 21, 1982, Mose Allison delivered one of the great performances of his career at the Montreux Jazz Festival. Fortunately, a tape was running.

Allison hadn't crossed the Atlantic for about 20 years, and a sizeable European cult following had turned out in force.

His choice of sidemen had also built up some serious expectations. Ex-Cream bassist Jack Bruce and former Mahavishnu Orchestra drummer Billy Cobham completed the piano-led trio, augmented later in a dynamically perfectly judged set by saxophonist Lou Donaldson and guitarist Eric Gale.

Allison's laconic vocal delivery has always been offset by a forceful piano style, and prodded along by Bruce and Cobham he was on storming form. The nine song set perfectly summarised exactly where one of jazz's most idiosyncratic talents stood at the time. There was blues, his wild post-bop piano work - and, of course, the deadpan delivery of his masterful mini-sermons, including perhaps the finest and most pointed of them all: Everybody's Cryin' Mercy.

Also preserved here are: the then-new Middle Class White Boy - an arch reflection on the posturing to which white boy blues has always been prone; the sharp wit of Your Mind Is on Vacation; and the philosophical resignation of I Don't Worry About a Thing ('Cause I Know Nothing's Going to Be Alright).

The well-selected covers include Willie Dixon's Seventh Son - a blues anthem he has made his own - Percy Mayfield's Lost Mind, and a bluesy reworking of the standard, You Are My Sunshine, with an arrangement that subtly subverts the jolliness of the lyric.

All of these songs are available elsewhere, and good live versions of most of them are also to be found  on the more recent Mose Chronicles sets recorded in 2000. But there's a freshness and urgency about these performances that marks them out as special.

The aim, Allison said, was 'to capture some of the immediacy and excitement unique to the occasion'. Lessons in Living achieves that, without post-production overdubs  or other studio trickery, in a way few live recordings do.



Mose Allison