Mos-ing Along

It was a lightly salted wise man who observed in song, “Your mind is on vacation and your mouth is working overtime.” It’s one of many bumper-sticker insights and Zen koan quips that have rolled off Mose Allison’s sage tongue during his 30-plus years in the trenches. But his own mind has never been on vacation, and his mouth works on its own time.

Allison, who plays at the Lobero Theatre on Friday night in the “Sings Like Hell” concert series, is one of those perennial heroes in American music who has carved out a one-man niche. At 70, the Mississippi-born pianist-singer-songwriter is going strong as ever.

His recent albums on Blue Note, including the latest, “Gimcracks and Gewgaws,” are among his finest song sets yet, full of pithy witticisms and a broad aesthetic drawing board. Plus, the music swings, in its loose-limbed funky way.

He’s a fine and individualistic pianist, drawing from blues, jazz, classical and other items on the style menu, and a singer whose hipster drawl of a voice is identifiable within a couple of slurred notes. His songs have been covered by younger popsters--including the Who, Bonnie Raitt, Van Morrison and Elvis Costello--which helps keep his name in the mainstream, beyond just jazz circles.

He spoke from his longtime home in Long Island, which used to be more like the rural sprawl of his Southern home turf, before the bulldozers of urban encroachment arrived.

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When I hear your music, it reminds me that your musical voice is all of a piece: The piano style and the singing and the lyrics all mesh. Is that your goal?

I’ve always thought that, too. People sometimes ask me, “What are you? Are you a piano player, a singer or what?” I say, “Look, I’m a musician. I do all those things and each one supplements the other one.”

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Where did the title of the new album, “Gimcracks and Gewgaws,” come from?

It’s a phrase I picked up down South years ago, and, at the time, I thought “Man, that’d make a good album title.” I got the idea to call the title tune on the album that because it’s a bunch of verses put together randomly. It wasn’t what I would call a song. Actually, it came about from doing little flexibility exercises on the piano, which I do sometimes if I’m not playing much, or playing too much. They’re just simple five-note exercises.

I do those things sometimes, and, in doing so, one of them would suggest a vocal line, a phrase. So I started writing these phrases down on a piece of paper as I was doing these exercises. Over the years, I got a page filled up with these one-liners. I decided to put them together and give it that title.

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Sometimes in your songs, there’s an interesting friction between a first impression and a closer scrutiny. The song “Numbers on Paper” is a lovely waltz, but these existential overtones creep in over the top. How did that come about?

I had the lyrical idea for that song for years. I had been thinking it would be a sort of a rock tune or a rhythm and blues tune, but I kept running across this old Hungarian folk melody. It’s a beautiful melody that you can find in two or three Hungarian composers’ work. Bartok and Kodaly used it. I started putting “Numbers on Paper” to that and it seemed to work real good.

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Speaking of classical composers, you’ve expressed your admiration for Charles Ives. Do you feel like you’re Ives-ian, in a way?

Oh, yeah. He was definitely an influence, a hero to me. I listen to him quite a bit. Those piano sonatas were a real revelation when I discovered them.

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Have you played those?

I don’t read well enough to play that music. I read music, but very slow. I can arrange music, because I take my time, but I couldn’t sight-read the simplest piece that you could come up with. So I’m unable to play any of the written-out stuff. I’m strictly self-taught. I always tell people, “Man, my piano playing is the result of playing for 48 years with no technique.”

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You slid in sideways to the singer-songwriter mode, didn’t you, after playing piano with Stan Getz and others in the ‘50s?

That’s not completely accurate. I wrote a song when I was 13 that I played at parties. As it turns out, some of the songs on this new album are the same type of song. It was sort of a Louis Jordan-inspired, bouncy rhythmic treatment.

I didn’t write a lot of lyrical stuff for several years. I concentrated more on being an instrumentalist. But then when I got to New York and started recording, and had pretty much exhausted the blues stuff I wanted to do, I knew that if I was going to keep working as a singer as well as a piano player, I was going to have to do my own repertoire.

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You have a tune called “Old Man Blues” on the new record, about the obsolescence factor in America. But isn’t jazz one area where being a veteran can be a virtue?

Well, you never solve anything or reach a finishing point in jazz. . . . If you’re really trying to play jazz and improvise, you’re always picking up new things, and you’re always retaining old things as well.

It’s a process that you’re undergoing. You never get to the end of it, as long as you can remain alert. I feel like I’m playing better than ever. I tell people I’m just now figuring out how to do what I’ve been trying to do all these years.

* Mose Allison, Friday at 8 p.m. at the Lobero Theatre, 33 W. Canon Perdido St., Santa Barbara. $28.50 in advance,$32.50 day of the show; (805) 963-0761.