JAZZ REVIEW : Mose Allison Retraces His Routes

Mose Allison, the country-style sophisticate from Mississippi, came back to the Vine St. Bar & Grill, doing essentially what he has done almost continuously for 35 years: singing about life the way he has seen it and playing piano the way he has heard it, but adding his own imprimatur along the way.

As always, before singing he opened with a series of piano solos on Thursday, segueing from one to the next, playing quasi-blues and crypto-blues, shifting tempos and meters, tossing out reverberant, rolling tremolos, with a bass player (Larry Steen) and a drummer (Paul Kreibich) who have clearly traveled this route before.

When old man Mose (he’s 63 now, a bit grayer and balder but otherwise unchanged) suddenly holds a vocal tone near the end of a phrase, his companions, suspended for a while in midair, watch him to see just when to come back in. It’s one of Allison’s gimmicks and he uses it well.

His Southern roots are never out of earshot. At one point he is a country boy deploring the evils of city life. Later, in “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know,” he is a cynic almost to the point of nihilism; in “Living in a Fool’s Paradise” he is a moralist, and in “I’m Not Discouraged, I’m Just Mad” he’s an ecologist.

Switching between his own songs and material from other sources (even including Nat King Cole), he interlarded every number with a rambling piano solo that defied stylistic evaluation: neither ancient nor modern, neither swing nor bop, just pure, unadulterated Mose.

An old pop song from England, “Sleepy Lagoon,” with an odd loping two-beat, was the only incongruous interlude. For the most part, though, Allison was able to bring conviction to the old Willie Dixon line that clearly reflects his philosophy: “I Live the Life I Love and I Love the Life I Live.”

* Vine St. Bar & Grill, 1610 Vine St., Hollywood, (213) 463-4375. Through Saturday.