Chuck Mangione, jazz horn participant and hitmaker, has died : NPR

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 up to date charts within the Seventies and ’80s. Along 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.

With his beard, lengthy hair and brown felt fedora, Chuck Mangione lower an unforgettable determine in American tradition, one which stretched effectively 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 very talked-about: The monitor “Feels So Good,” from the double-platinum album of the identical identify, hit No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and the highest of the grownup up to date chart in 1978.

Mangione was born Nov. 29, 1940, in Rochester, which remained his house 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 Young Man with a Horn. He began a jazz band together with his brother, Gaspare, nicknamed Gap, in highschool. The two 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 School of Music the place Mangione picked up the flugelhorn, on the best way to a bachelor’s diploma in music. Still, it was on the trumpet that he actually lower his enamel, taking part in with Art 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. Friends & 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 Records, netting him his first of 14 Grammy nominations for the monitor “Hill Where the Lord Hides.” In 1973, one other dwell album, Land of Make Believe, with vocals by Esther Satterfield, received widespread different 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 Children of Sanchez. Mangione additionally wrote music for 2 Olympics, the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal and the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid. “Give It All You Got,” the piece he performed on the latter’s closing ceremony, earned an Emmy.

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 kids’s live shows. And in later years, he grew to become acquainted to a brand new technology 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’s within the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, together with the rating to “Feels So Good” and a trove of images and albums, which Mangione donated to the establishment in 2009.