Junior Mance - Junior's Blues

1998 CD reissue.

The tendency to look back at jazz tradition, so commonplace in recent years, was highly unusual at the time Junior Mance recorded this inspired trio album. His versions of blues classics by Meade Lux Lewis, Leroy Carr, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker/Jay McShann, and Thelonious Monk reveal a keen sense of the music’s history that suits the natural soul always evident in Mance’s playing. Taste is another of the pianist’s strong suits, as he proves by completing the program with three evocative originals and the non-blues but totally funky Ray Brown hit "Gravy Waltz," and by recruiting the ideal partners in bassist Bob Cranshaw and drummer Mickey Roker (a pair that still performs together to this day under Milt Jackson’s leadership). Every jazz musician plays the blues at one time or another, though few do it with the conviction displayed here by Junior Mance.