Junior Mance - Junior (1981 Japanese Verve Stereo LP)

Vinyl: EX
Sleeve: VG+
Obi: None

Our grading system explained here.
Photo is of the actual item.

Junior 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 Have Trumpet, Will Excite!, 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.

The 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. Junior 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.