Jazz flugelhorn player and composer Chuck Mangione died in his sleep on Tuesday at his home in Rochester, N.Y. He was 84. Mangione's smooth jazz hits topped the Billboard adult contemporary charts in the 1970s and '80s. Along the way, he picked up two Grammys and an Emmy Award, and played himself as a recurring guest star on a Fox animated series.
With his beard, long hair and brown felt fedora, Chuck Mangione cut an unforgettable figure in American culture, one that stretched well beyond the jazz world. His instrument was the flugelhorn, larger and mellower than a traditional trumpet, and the music he wrote and played fused pop and electric sounds with the warmth of the flugelhorn and strong melodic hooks. For a while, his music was very popular: The track "Feels So Good," from the double-platinum album of the same name, hit No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and the top of the adult contemporary chart in 1978.
Mangione was born Nov. 29, 1940, in Rochester, which remained his home throughout his life. His parents owned a grocery store, and he began music lessons in elementary school, choosing to play the trumpet after he saw the Kirk Douglas film Young Man with a Horn. He started a jazz band with his brother, Gaspare, nicknamed Gap, in high school. The two sat in with jazz luminaries like Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie at the Ridge Crest Inn outside the city. Gillespie became what Mangione called "my musical father," and gifted him a trumpet when he was 15.
It was at the Eastman School of Music where Mangione picked up the flugelhorn, on the way to a bachelor's degree in music. Still, it was on the trumpet that he really cut his teeth, playing with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, which also featured Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea at the time.
By the early 1970s, Mangione had struck out on his own. Friends & Love, a concert of his music performed with the Rochester Philharmonic, was recorded and released privately before being picked up by Mercury Records, netting him his first of 14 Grammy nominations for the track "Hill Where the Lord Hides." In 1973, another live album, Land of Make Believe, with vocals by Esther Satterfield, got widespread alternative FM play.
A&M records, Herb Alpert's label, picked Mangione up from there, and he continued to climb the charts with Chase the Clouds Away and Feels So Good. He won his two Grammy awards in the '70s, for the track "Bellavia" and for the title track to the film Children of Sanchez. Mangione also wrote music for two Olympics, the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal and the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid. "Give It All You Got," the piece he played at the latter's closing ceremony, earned an Emmy.
Mangione toured extensively over the years, played with symphony orchestras and appeared on TV. He dedicated much of his life to music education, creating and teaching at Eastman's jazz program. He also performed with high school bands and invited kids to play onstage at his matinee children's concerts. And in later years, he became familiar to a new generation when he voiced a comic version himself on King of the Hill, as a pitchman for the department store Mega Lo Mart.
Oh, and that signature brown felt hat? It's in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, along with the score to "Feels So Good" and a trove of photographs and albums, which Mangione donated to the institution in 2009.
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