Chuck Mangione performs on the A Time To Care gala in 2004 in Holmby Hills, Calif.
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Robert Bertoia/Getty Photos
Jazz flugelhorn participant and composer Chuck Mangione died in his sleep on Tuesday at his residence in Rochester, N.Y. He was 84. Mangione’s easy jazz hits topped the Billboard grownup modern charts within the Seventies and ’80s. Alongside the way in which, he picked up two Grammys and an Emmy Award, and performed himself as a recurring visitor star on a Fox animated collection.
Along with his beard, lengthy hair and brown felt fedora, Chuck Mangione reduce an unforgettable determine in American tradition, one which stretched properly past the jazz world. His instrument was the flugelhorn, bigger and mellower than a conventional trumpet, and the music he wrote and performed fused pop and electrical sounds with the heat of the flugelhorn and robust melodic hooks. For some time, his music was extremely popular: The monitor “Feels So Good,” from the double-platinum album of the identical identify, hit No. 4 on the Billboard Scorching 100 and the highest of the grownup modern chart in 1978.
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Mangione was born Nov. 29, 1940, in Rochester, which remained his residence all through his life. His dad and mom owned a grocery retailer, and he started music classes in elementary college, selecting to play the trumpet after he noticed the Kirk Douglas movie Younger Man with a Horn. He began a jazz band along with his brother, Gaspare, nicknamed Hole, in highschool. The 2 sat in with jazz luminaries like Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie on the Ridge Crest Inn exterior the town. Gillespie grew to become what Mangione known as “my musical father,” and gifted him a trumpet when he was 15.
It was on the Eastman Faculty of Music the place Mangione picked up the flugelhorn, on the way in which to a bachelor’s diploma in music. Nonetheless, it was on the trumpet that he actually reduce his enamel, enjoying with Artwork Blakey‘s Jazz Messengers, which additionally featured Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea on the time.
By the early Seventies, Mangione had struck out on his personal. Mates & Love, a live performance of his music carried out with the Rochester Philharmonic, was recorded and launched privately earlier than being picked up by Mercury Data, netting him his first of 14 Grammy nominations for the monitor “Hill The place the Lord Hides.” In 1973, one other dwell album, Land of Make Consider, with vocals by Esther Satterfield, obtained widespread various FM play.
A&M data, 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 gained his two Grammy awards within the ’70s, for the monitor “Bellavia” and for the title monitor to the movie Youngsters of Sanchez. Mangione additionally wrote music for 2 Olympics, the 1976 Summer season Video games in Montreal and the 1980 Winter Video games in Lake Placid. “Give It All You Acquired,” the piece he performed on the latter’s closing ceremony, earned an Emmy.
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Mangione toured extensively through the years, performed with symphony orchestras and appeared on TV. He devoted a lot of his life to music training, creating and educating at Eastman’s jazz program. He additionally carried out with highschool bands and invited children to play onstage at his matinee kids’s concert events. And in later years, he grew to become acquainted to a brand new era when he voiced a comic book model himself on King of the Hill, as a pitchman for the division retailer Mega Lo Mart.
Oh, and that signature brown felt hat? It is within the Smithsonian Nationwide Museum of American Historical past, together with the rating to “Feels So Good” and a trove of images and albums, which Mangione donated to the establishment in 2009.
