Chuck Mangione performs on the A Time To Care gala in 2004 in Holmby Hills, Calif.
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Robert Bertoia/Getty Photographs
Jazz flugelhorn participant and composer Chuck Mangione died in his sleep on Tuesday at his house in Rochester, N.Y. He was 84. Mangione’s clean jazz hits topped the Billboard grownup modern charts within the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s. Alongside the best way, he picked up two Grammys and an Emmy Award, and performed himself as a recurring visitor star on a Fox animated sequence.
Together with his beard, lengthy hair and brown felt fedora, Chuck Mangione reduce an unforgettable determine in American tradition, one which stretched nicely past the jazz world. His instrument was the flugelhorn, bigger and mellower than a standard trumpet, and the music he wrote and performed fused pop and electrical sounds with the heat of the flugelhorn and powerful melodic hooks. For some time, his music was highly regarded: The observe “Feels So Good,” from the double-platinum album of the identical title, hit No. 4 on the Billboard Sizzling 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 house all through his life. His mother and father 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 together 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 outdoors the town. Gillespie turned what Mangione referred to 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 best way to a bachelor’s diploma in music. Nonetheless, it was on the trumpet that he actually reduce his enamel, taking part in with Artwork Blakey‘s Jazz Messengers, which additionally featured Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea on the time.
By the early Nineteen Seventies, Mangione had struck out on his personal. Pals & 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 Information, netting him his first of 14 Grammy nominations for the observe “Hill The place the Lord Hides.” In 1973, one other reside album, Land of Make Imagine, with vocals by Esther Satterfield, bought widespread different FM play.
A&M information, 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 received his two Grammy awards within the ’70s, for the observe “Bellavia” and for the title observe 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 Bought,” 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 schooling, creating and educating at Eastman’s jazz program. He additionally carried out with highschool bands and invited youngsters to play onstage at his matinee youngsters’s live shows. And in later years, he turned 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.
