While the arrival of rock’n’roll in the 1950s helped deflate the popularity that jazz music had once enjoyed, there would be artists who found a way to bring it back into the mainstream. One of them was Chuck Mangione, who has died aged 84.
Brought up listening to jazz greats such as Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, he helped to create what become known as “smooth jazz”, a kind of easy-listening popular music that one might find oneself listening to in lifts or airport lounges, inflected with jazzy phrasing and deploying jazz instruments. It was Mangione’s flugelhorn that played the haunting theme of Feels So Good, his biggest hit, which reached No 4 on the US chart in 1978, but the track also featured electric and wah-wah guitars, a funky bassline and a danceable drum-beat. The track’s parent album (featuring an extended version of Feels So Good) soared to No 2 on its respective chart.
Mangione attributed its success to the fact that the airwaves had been saturated with the Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. He said: “Radio programmers couldn’t figure out what to put on instead and when somebody edited Feels So Good from nine minutes down to three, they instantly started playing it as an alternative to what were the current top songs.”
His music’s broad, if unchallenging, appeal also made it suitable for public occasions. The gently-lilting beat and mix of brass and woodwinds in Chase the Clouds Away featured at the 1976 summer Olympics in Montreal, while for the 1980 winter games in Lake Placid, New York, the ABC Sports TV network adopted his composition Give It All You Got.
He won the first of his two Grammys – he received 13 Grammy nominations during his career – for Bellavia, a slow and moody piece, which drew its title from his mother’s maiden name. He collected the second in 1979, for Best Pop Instrumental Performance, for his soundtrack to the film The Children of Sanchez, which starred Anthony Quinn.
Born in Rochester, New York, Chuck (Charles) was the son of Nancy (nee Bellavia), who worked for a home appliances manufacturer, and Frank Mangione, who worked for the Eastman Kodak Company. Later his parents opened a family grocery store, Mangione’s Market.
Both were enthusiastic jazz fans, and they signed Chuck up for music lessons at the age of eight. He began learning the piano, but after seeing Michael Curtiz’s film Young Man With a Horn (in which Kirk Douglas played a character based on cornet player Bix Beiderbecke) he switched to trumpet. His older brother, Gaspare (nicknamed Gap), was learning the piano and the brothers would practise together at home.
Both boys would often be taken by their father to the Ridge Crest Inn in the Rochester suburb of Irondequoit. It was a well-known jazz venue where Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis had all played. Mangione told Jazz Times magazine how their father would introduce the brothers to artists such as Dizzy Gillespie and they’d be invited to sit in with the band. He then explained how “my dad would invite everyone to our house for spaghetti and home-made wine … This week it would be Dizzy, the next week Carmen McRae, then Sarah Vaughan, Art Blakey, Kai Winding.”
By the time Chuck enrolled in Rochester’s Eastman School of Music in 1958, where he studied the trumpet and flugelhorn, he and Gap had already been playing in their own high school quintet, the Jazz Brothers. Before Chuck graduated with a bachelor’s degree in music in 1963, the Jazz Brothers had already recorded three albums for the renowned Riverside jazz label.
In 1965, he did stints with the big bands of Woody Herman and Maynard Ferguson, before being recruited for Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. He recalled how “Art was looking around for a horn player and he called Dizzy Gillespie. Dizzy said, ‘Do you remember that kid from Rochester, NY?’ and he recommended me to play with him.” Thus Mangione filled the trumpeter’s slot previously occupied by such illustrious players as Clifford Brown, Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan.
By the end of the 60s, Mangione had returned to the Eastman School as director of its jazz ensemble. He had also formed a quartet that featured the saxophonist and flautist Gerry Niewood, which enjoyed success throughout the 70s.
In 1970 he made a breakthrough as a solo artist when he organised a concert of his own compositions, that mixed jazz, classical and pop styles, accompanied by the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. A recording of the event was privately released, entitled Friends and Love … A Chuck Mangione Concert. This came to the attention of Mercury Records, who signed Mangione and released the album, which earned a Grammy nomination in 1971. A single from the album, Hill Where the Lord Hides, reached No 76 on the Billboard chart.
After his album Land of Make Believe (1973) picked up a lot of airplay on alternative-rock radio stations, largely thanks to its exotically tropical-sounding title track with vocals by Esther Sattersfield, he moved from Mercury to A&M records, which would release his most successsful albums.
Outside music, Mangione made regular TV appearances. He appeared in the detective show Magnum, PI, and the children’s series Sharon, Lois & Bram’s Elephant Show. A fictional version of himself had a recurring role in Fox TV’s animated series King of the Hill – which featured numerous high-profile guests including Brad Pitt, Tom Petty and Meryl Streep – as a promoter of Mega-Lo Mart stores, usually wearing the white and red jacket from the sleeve of his Feels So Good album. He recalled: “My character would do things like play Taps and switch right into Feels So Good. I figured that since they were playing my music and to such a large audience, why not?” He also wrote the genial instrumental Peggy Hill for a Valentine’s Day episode.
His wife, Rosie (Rosemarie, nee Accardi), died in 2015. He is survived by two daughters, Diana and Nancy, three grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, a sister, Josephine, and Gap.
• Chuck (Charles Frank) Mangione, musician and composer, born 29 November 1940; died 22 July 2025
