The Mose Allison Songbook and More at Bakery

Mention Mose Allison and most jazz fans will immediately respond with, “Yeah. ‘Your Mind Is on Vacation’ or ‘Parchman Farm’ or ‘I’m Not Talking’!” His renderings of those--and many other--home-cooked, Southern-fried tunes have been Allison’s stock in trade since the days when he was better known as a bop-tinged pianist than as a singer.

Thursday night at the Jazz Bakery, in the opening performance of a four-night run, he delivered a stack of similar numbers. Each was dispensed in his distinctive vocal style--a drawling but briskly explosive articulation that is as instantly recognizable as any sound in jazz.

Allison, 71, is one of a trio of jazz pianists--along with David Frishberg and Bob Dorough--who have established a kind of offbeat jazz vocal niche of their own. Although their styles are different, their songs are similar in the wry, ironic observations they make about the travails of life in the late 20th century.

In “I’m Not Talking,” for example, Allison sang, “The things that really matter, don’t mix with idle chatter.” Other tunes included “Tell Me Something (That I Don’t Know),” an idiomatic rendering of Duke Ellington’s “I’m Just a Lucky So and So” and the blues classic “Trouble in Mind.” He could easily have spent another few sets just working through such original classics as “Certified Senior Citizen,” “I Don’t Love You,” “I’m Smashed” and his definitive version of Willie Dixon’s “The Seventh Son.” (Undoubtedly many of them will work their way on to his program later in the week.)

But--like Frishberg and Dorough--Allison is also an inventive pianist. And on one apparently spontaneous improvisation with bassist Dave Carpenter, he romped through the maze of his own unique harmonic universe, shifting easily from fat clusters of dissonance to insinuating, down-home blues rhythms.

The brief instrumental solos in the vocal numbers were equally distinctive, alternating a rolling chromaticism with crisp bebop lines and sardonic blues interjections, all of it accompanied by his murmured grunts and groans.

It was an impressive performance from one of the true jazz originals, and--beyond that--from an artist who is very clear about who he is and what he has to offer.

* Mose Allison (with Dave Carpenter) at the Jazz Bakery through Sunday. 3233 Helms Ave., Culver City, (310) 271-9039. $20 admission tonight at 8 and 9:30, and $18 Sunday at 7 and 8:30 p.m.