Julian Clifford Mance, Jr. (October 10, 1928 – January 17, 2021), known as Junior Mance, was an American jazz pianist and composer.

Mance was born in Evanston, Illinois. When he was five years old, Mance started playing piano on an upright in his family’s home in Evanston.^[4] His father, Julian, taught Mance to play stride piano and boogie-woogie. With his father’s permission, Mance had his first professional gig in Chicago at the age of ten when his upstairs neighbor, a saxophone player, needed a replacement for a pianist who was ill. Mance was known to his family as “Junior” (to differentiate him from his father), and the nickname stuck with him throughout his professional career.

Mance’s mother encouraged him to study medicine at nearby Northwestern University in Evanston, but agreed to let him attend Roosevelt College in Chicago instead. Despite urging him to enroll in pre-med classes, Mance signed up for music classes, though he found that jazz was forbidden by the faculty, and did not finish out the year.