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Show By NICK SNOW Chronicle Jazz Editor Jazz pianist and vocalist Mose Allison will make his first Utah appearance tonight at 7:30 in Kingsbury Hall. Sponsored by Artists and Speakers, the appearance will feature Allison performing his immortal "Seventh Son," in addition to some new material. Tickets are on sale in the Huddle Ticket Booth and at the door for $1.50 for students and $2.50 for the public. Allison's "down home" sound of the Deep South started in Tippo, Mississippi, a place he recalls as having "a couple of general stores, a cotton gin, a service station, a lot of dust, a lot of mud." Taking five years of elementary piano until his eleventh year, he also picked up influences from honky tonks, radio programs, and juke boxes. "There were some local musicians mu-sicians that played good country blues. I started out playing boogie-woogie myself, more or less. I went through all the different phases." Playing in college dance bands "on trumpet, mostly," he started out with a trio in 1950 in Lake Charles, La., touring the Southeast until he went to New York. There, he played sporadic gigs, until he wound up with Stan Getz on what he now describes as "a semi-permanent basis." "It was always in my mind to have my own trio again, but it was a matter of working with other groups first, getting around, getting known, and so forth. Unless you happen to have some sort of freak publicity thing for some reason or other, or a hit record, it takes a long time," he said. "I was in New York for five years before I started getting much trio work. It's just been the last two years or so that I've actually worked fairly steady." His "Back Country Suite," cut in the late fifties for Columbia, Colum-bia, is one of his better known works internationally, but it was with the pressing of "The Seventh Son" in the early sixties that Allison found himself skyrocketed to the foreground. With "Parchman Farm," a bizarre ditty to end all bizarre ditties, I5 the limited pressings by Prestige were completely gone in a matter of weeks. Allison's most recent albums, all on the Atlantic label, include a live performance of some of his more popular hits, "Mose Alive!" (Atlantic 1450) The vocal part of his performance, perform-ance, now a major part, was originally soft pedalled, even 1 though he'd been singing all his life at the piano. ' "I don't regard myself as primarily a jazz artist," he recently noted. "I regard myself as a musician who's playing some jazz, doing some composing and singing., I don't regard anybody I've ever heard as a pure jazz artist, for that matter. Because jazz is performed, thought, felt, and conceived at the same time. And most of what you hear that passes for jazz is simulated jazz. The Allison sound is so close to "pure jazz' to the average listener that one freshman was moved to remark, "Mose Allison Al-lison at the University? I hope no one comes I'll take the live performance pure and undiluted by the sound of even human hu-man breathing!" |