Not so many decades back, when the smart-suited, fedora-wearing megastars who created the jazz we know were still alive and blowing, Junior Mance was a brilliant swing pianist who more or less got lost in a glittering crowd. Now nearly all of his contemporaries are gone and the 73-year-old Chicago musician has acquired a uniqueness, his pearly, blues-inflected piano broadcasting musical messages from a bygone era.
Mance was joined in Maidstone by two local musicians tailor-made for him: bassist Malcolm Creese and drummer Steve Brown. Brown is a young curiosity who shows little interest in the contemporary polyrhythmics of Elvin Jones or Jeff "Tain" Watts, preferring the more direct methods of the swing and early bebop drummers. Creese is a highly musical double-bassist of rich, plummy tone, penetrating attack and distinctive phrasing. Between them, they made Mance's already bubbling music sound even more effervescent.
Mance began with a mid-tempo swinger, whose typical theme of rumbling low-register figures resolved into stabbing chords and trickly arpeggios. Falling in Love With Love brought streaming runs of glancingly struck notes, emphatic repeated figures and thumbed rips down the keyboard, played over Brown's hustling brushwork. Mance's own resounding composition Jubilation was full of pounding chords and lightly tripping descending figures. He prefaced it by saying: "This is the first tune I ever wrote. People said, 'Why didn't you quit while you were ahead?' "
Georgia on My Mind brought a delectable bass solo of measured figures and humming sustained notes from Creese, and Mance jokily wound up an otherwise poetic episode on a repeated single note, as if he were tuning the instrument. Ray Bryant's I Don't Care, a sardonic mid-tempo blues, stood out, but Mance's delicate account of Duke Ellington's The Single Petal of a Rose (from the Queen's Suite) showed that tender emotion isn't a subject he regards entirely with suspicion.
· Junior Mance plays the Band on the Wall, Manchester (0161-833 0682), tonight, then tours.
