Junior Mance | Piano | 1928–2021

The blues inheritance in Mance's playing was direct and conscious: his father taught him stride and boogie-woogie from age five on the family upright in Evanston, Illinois, and the emotional logic of that foundation never left his bebop vocabulary. He was working professionally in Chicago by the age of ten, joined Gene Ammons' band in 1947, spent nearly two years with Lester Young, and after U.S. Army service at Fort Knox alongside Cannonball Adderley became the house pianist at Chicago's Bee Hive jazz club, backing Charlie Parker and Coleman Hawkins among others. Stints with Dinah Washington and then Dizzy Gillespie, whose band Mance later described as one of the highlights of his career, preceded his move to New York and the start of his recording career as a leader. His debut "Junior" (Verve, 1959), made with bassist Ray Brown and drummer Lex Humphries, introduced a pianist who could work inside bop harmony while keeping everything grounded in the blues, a quality that defined his Verve and Jazzland albums of the early 1960s. He taught at Jazzmobile in New York for many years and remained active as a performer until the mid-2010s.