A fan base, earned one by one

Is Mose Allison a bluesman who plays jazz piano or a jazz pianist who sings the blues? A songwriter or a song stylist?

“I’ve slipped through all the categories, for sure,” Allison, 77, says from his longtime Long Island, N.Y., home, though not longtime enough to have had the slightest effect on his rich Mississippi accent.

“One of the booking agents I had had the blues people listed in one category, the jazz people in another one, the country people in another, and at the bottom of the page it said, ‘And Mose Allison.’

“Maybe that’s why a lot of people are a little confused by what I do.”

What Allison does is craft wry songs filled with irony and mordant wit, delivered in an easygoing, sometimes deadpan style, underscored by his own uncluttered piano accompaniment. He’s been doing it for half a century, long enough to lend weight to his original song “Certified Senior Citizen,” which evokes good-humored dismay over the decaying of his body.

Not that Allison is ready for a retirement home or a rocking chair. He still plays more than 125 shows a year, with a run at Los Angeles’ Jazz Bakery scheduled for Feb. 22-27. His calendar typically includes a handful of extended club engagements. “I have several of those that I do every year,” Allison says, “some that I’ve been playing 30 years.” Which is how he’s developed regular pickup rhythm sections nationwide and as far away as Hong Kong and London, where his annual three-week stints were captured live on two CDs titled “The Mose Chronicles.”

Allison’s penchant for England in particular is mutual: The English have long had a fondness for him, dating to 1970, when the Who covered Allison’s caustic “Young Man’s Blues” (as “Young Man Blues”) and made it the incendiary opening track on the band’s classic “Live at Leeds” album (and later a centerpiece of its 1979 concert film, “The Kids Are Alright”). Allison had no idea the Who had even recorded it until the first royalty check -- for $5,000 -- arrived in the mail. He was used to getting checks in the $20 range.

“It was a shock,” he says. “I thought it was a mistake.

“The British rockers have helped me survive,” Allison adds, and that’s been true since the late ‘60s, when Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, John Mayall, and the Eric Clapton-led Yardbirds recorded his songs. In the ‘80s, he was covered by the Clash (“Look Here”) and Robert Palmer (“Top Forty”), and in 1996, Van Morrison teamed up with Fame and Allison protege Ben Sidran to record “Tell Me Something: The Songs of Mose Allison.” Bonnie Raitt was “just about the only American that did my stuff early,” Allison says of Raitt’s 1973 cover of “Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy.”

While musicians have kept Allison’s songs in currency, he’s been content to cruise just below the surface, creating a small but distinctive songbook and honing an understated performing style that’s been widely emulated, though Allison dismisses it as “the result of playing 50 years with no technique.”

“I’ve been able to survive,” he says. “I always tell people I got my fans one at a time, without the benefits of a hit record or a hit TV show. And it’s paying off now because most places I play, I run into people who’ve been listening to me for 40 years, and they pull out the old albums for me to sign.

“I feel fortunate that I was able to record all these years without ever being a big seller,” Allison says. “I was fortunate enough to have supporters in record companies that kept me recording even though I wasn’t making them any money, people like Nesuhi Ertegun [at Atlantic] and Bruce Lundvall” at Columbia and later Blue Note, for whom Allison has recorded since 1987.

“I’m thankful for that because you can’t exist without records. Most everybody you talk to says, ‘What’s your latest record?’ ”