{"title":"Junior Mance","description":"\u003cp\u003eJunior 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"junior-mance-junior-1981-japanese-verve-stereo-lp","title":"Junior Mance - Junior (1981 Japanese Verve Stereo LP)","description":"\u003cp data-start=\"1061\" data-end=\"1214\"\u003e\u003cb\u003eVinyl\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cspan\u003e: EX\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSleeve\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cspan\u003e: VG+\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eObi:\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003eNone\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOur grading system explained \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/dpbg4u-d1.myshopify.com\/pages\/secondhand-grading-guide\"\u003e\u003cspan class=\"s1\"\u003e\u003cb\u003ehere\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003cspan\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003ePhoto is of the actual item.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003eJunior Mance came out of Chicago in the late 1940s carrying the city's twin musical inheritances on his hands: the church and the South Side blues. By the time Norman Granz offered him a Verve date in 1959, he had already done his time in Gene Ammons' band, served the army stint that put him alongside Cannonball Adderley in the 36th Army Band, played in Cannonball's first New York quintet (1956–58), and joined Dizzy Gillespie's group (1958–60). The Granz offer came in the middle of sessions for Gillespie's \u003cem\u003eHave Trumpet, Will Excite!\u003c\/em\u003e, and Mance walked into the studio a few months later with Ray Brown on bass and Gillespie's drummer Lex Humphries already locked in to his rhythmic instincts. The program is exactly what an end-of-the-fifties Verve trio date sounds like in the hands of someone who had been listening hard to Ahmad Jamal and Wynton Kelly without losing his own blues vocabulary: a smooth Benny Goodman number to open, a Benny Golson ballad to settle, Cole Porter's \"Love for Sale\" pulled apart and put back together at trio tempo, Gillespie's \"Birk's Works\" played by the rhythm section that knew it intimately, and three Mance originals built around the same kind of churchy, blues-soaked harmonic instincts that would carry him through another sixty years of working as a leader.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003eThe album sat in the Verve catalogue across the 1960s and 1970s as a discreetly admired piece of work without ever attracting the cult attention paid to the contemporaneous Bill Evans or Wynton Kelly trio records. Japanese collectors caught onto Mance early. By 1981 Polydor Japan was issuing the Verve hard-bop catalogue in their Best Jazz Collection series, with careful mastering and the kind of quiet pressings the Japanese plants of the period were known for. \u003cem\u003eJunior\u003c\/em\u003e came out in that program as 18MJ 9018, sequenced alongside other under-discussed Verve titles by trio-format pianists. This is the 1981 Japanese Polydor pressing in the Best Jazz Collection Verve series.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Verve Records","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43545437175867,"sku":null,"price":40.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0630\/3203\/3339\/files\/IMG_7105.jpg?v=1779701824"}],"url":"https:\/\/lushliferecords.com.au\/collections\/junior-mance.oembed","provider":"Lush Life Records","version":"1.0","type":"link"}