Chuck Mangione, ‘smooth jazz’ hitmaker with a flugelhorn, dies at 84

Chuck Mangione holds his flugelhorn, at the Blue Note in New York on May 4, 2000. (Steve Berman/The New York Times)

By Barry Singer

Chuck Mangione, whose limpid flugelhorn ruled the upper reaches of Billboard’s adult contemporary charts in the 1970s and ’80s with a culture-permeating lilt that helped create the genre known as “smooth jazz,” died last Tuesday at his home in Rochester, New York. He was 84.

His death was confirmed by his family in a statement, which did not specify a cause.

Mangione was a true pop star with an instantly recognizable signature silhouette: bewhiskered, his long hair crowned by a turned-down felt fedora. He was nominated 14 times for Grammy Awards and won twice: in 1976 for best instrumental composition, “Bellavia”; and in 1979 for best pop instrumental performance, for the title track from his score to the film “The Children of Sanchez.”

Mangione hits could be grandiose, including “Land of Make Believe,” or lightly funky, such as the aptly named “Feels So Good,” a Top 10 hit in 1978. Always melodic, his cotton-candy hooks could bore into listeners’ senses with a mood-elevating rush.

Mangione’s smooth jazz borrowed extensively from fusion — the infusion of electronic instruments into the jazz mainstream that Miles Davis had spearheaded in the late 1960s — dosing it with gossamer flamenco-ish guitar and a disco backbeat, the perfect sonic pillow for his lyrical flugelhorn. The result was a pop-jazz hybrid with enormous commercial appeal.

“Feels So Good,” released in October 1977 as the title track off what quickly became a double-platinum album, made Mangione a superstar and cemented his style. It was infused with jazzlike licks but light on true jazz improvisation. Still, it brought the notion of jazz to a vast music-buying public that, for at least a decade, had been focused almost exclusively on rock ’n’ roll and its offshoots.

Mangione’s jazz roots ran deep. His earliest work had been as a trumpeter in the 1960s in the big bands of Woody Herman and Maynard Ferguson and drummer Art Blakey’s quintet (which also included a young Keith Jarrett on piano), and he knew how to blow. Stardom in the record business did not ultimately gratify him.

“I would get a lot of calls from different companies,” he recalled. “‘Oh, yeah, Chuck, you started that “smooth jazz” sound and we’d love to have you. Here’s what we’d like to do: We’d like the tempo to be like this and it’s got to have this sound, and a juggler and three elephants, and … .’ I was not excited about that.”

Mangione also wrote music that underscored two Olympics: “Chase the Clouds Away,” for the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal, and “Give It All You Got,” which he performed live for the globally televised closing ceremony of the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York. That performance won him an Emmy and became his second Top 40 hit.

Charles Frank Mangione was born Nov. 29, 1940, in Rochester. His father, Frank, worked for Eastman Kodak, and his mother, Nancy (Bellavia) Mangione, worked at Samson United, a Rochester-based home appliance manufacturer, before the two of them opened a grocery store, Mangione’s Market.

His music-loving parents enrolled him in music school when he was 8. At age 10, he saw the Kirk Douglas film “Young Man With a Horn” and decided that he wanted to play the trumpet. His older brother, Gaspare, a budding pianist known to the family as Gap, became his at-home performing partner.

His father soon began taking his sons to the nearby Ridgecrest Inn, where jazz luminaries such as Davis, Blakey and Dizzy Gillespie played regularly. “My father would walk up to someone like Dizzy and say: ‘Hi, Mr. Gillespie. These are my two sons and they can play.’ And we would sit in,” Mangione recalled in a 1999 interview with JazzTimes magazine.

“Then,” he added, “my dad would invite everyone to our house for spaghetti and homemade wine. Dad had a grocery store attached to the house, and Mother loved to cook, so we could have a party in a minute. This week it would be Dizzy, the next week Carmen McRae, then Sarah Vaughan, Art Blakey, Kai Winding.”

It was Gillespie who became his mentor — “my musical father,” as Mangione put it. As a gift, Gillespie gave the 15-year old Mangione one of his trademark upswept trumpets.

While still in high school, the Mangione brothers formed a quintet, the Jazz Brothers. Chuck then proceeded to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester in 1958, graduating in 1963 with a bachelor’s degree in music. It was at Eastman where he first picked up the flugelhorn.

Through the admiring efforts of great saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, the brothers also began recording for Riverside Records, while the younger Mangione was still at Eastman. They released their first album, “The Jazz Brothers,” in 1960, and two more, “Hey Baby” and “Spring Fever,” the next year.

Chuck Mangione headed for New York City after graduating and joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1965 on Gillespie’s recommendation. The next year, he did some arranging for the Outsiders, a Cleveland-based garage-rock band, including on a single, “Help Me Girl,” which cracked the Billboard Top 40.

Mangione is survived by his daughters, Nancy Piraino and Diana Smith; a sister, Josephine Shank; his brother, Gap; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. His wife, Rosemarie, died in 2015.

“I’ve written probably 95% of the music I’ve played,” Mangione once said, “but I don’t take credit for writing the music. I feel like the cord between the plug in the wall and the tape recorder; I wait around and hope I get some new information, and then try to present it in the best possible way. I’m very protective of it and don’t put it out there until I feel like it’s really happening.

He added: “Dizzy taught me that if you want to just play whatever you want to play without considering the audience, fine. But if you want to get paid, you’re now in a different ballgame.”