Collection: Junior Mance

Junior Mance's piano style was fixed before he finished high school. His father taught him stride and boogie-woogie on the family upright in Evanston, Illinois, and by the time he was ten he was playing professional gigs in Chicago. The blues ran through everything he did after that, not as a genre category but as a shaping force, giving his bop playing a weight and earthiness that set him apart from the more purely harmonic pianists of his generation. He joined Gene Ammons' band in 1947, spent nearly two years with Lester Young, and after Army service at Fort Knox alongside Cannonball Adderley became the house pianist at the Bee Hive jazz club in Chicago, where he backed Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, and others coming through the city. Work with Dinah Washington and then Dizzy Gillespie followed before Mance settled in New York and began recording under his own name for Verve in 1959. His debut, "Junior", with Ray Brown and Lex Humphries, and the albums that came immediately after, particularly "The Soulful Piano of Junior Mance" and the live "Junior Mance Trio at the Village Vanguard", made the case plainly: here was a pianist who could play bebop harmony and make it feel like church. His early-to-mid 1960s output on Verve, Jazzland, and Riverside is the core of the catalogue collectors seek out.