Tribute/ Chuck Mangione

BY NARENDRA KUSNUR

Obituary/ Chuck Mangione (1940-2025)

Genre: Smooth jazz

I remember the first time I heard Chuck Mangione. The year was 1983, and I was 19. I visited my regular record store in Greater Kailash 1, New Delhi, to check out some pop or rock records. An instrumental tune was playing on the speakers and I asked the owner who it was. He took out the record sleeve and told me it was 'Stepping Out' from the album Love Notes by Chuck Mangione, who played a flugelhorn which is from the trumpet family.

This incident came back to mind on hearing of 84-year-old Mangione's death on July 22. My favourite tunes 'Feels So Good', 'Memories Of Scirocco', 'Children Of Sanchez' and 'Land Of Make Believe' came back to mind, and I played them on Spotify after hearing the news.

I remember that introduction to Mangione's music very clearly.

"What kind of music is this called?" I had asked - I must have heard the word 'genre' a decade later. "Jazz," he replied. "Isn't George Benson also jazz?" I asked, my awareness coming through the film All That Jazz which had Benson's 'On Broadway'. He didn't seem to know the answer, but he said Shakti is a mix of Indian music and jazz, in a probable attempt at selling the Shakti album Natural Elements to me.

He succeeded, as on the next visit, I ended up buying the Shakti album along with Mangione's Love Notes, which began with 'Stepping Out'. Once home, I was glued to the tune 'Memories of Scirocco'. Even today, it sounds equally fresh. It's one of the most romantic pieces ever.

Besides being part of my introduction to jazz, there was something about Mangione's tone and sense of melody that made his pieces stand out. The tunes brought joy. He was normally categorised under smooth jazz, which aimed at spreading the genre to pop listeners through more catchy hooks. Because of that, he wasn't taken seriously by the purists, who looked for complex phrasing and deft improvisation. For them, this was elevator music. 

But if one checks Mangione closely, there were a lot of intricate structures that went alongside the catchy melody lines. Besides flugelhorn, he was adept at electric piano. Equally important, he was a composer who knew the pulse of audiences at large. Check out his playing on 'Land Of Make Believe', which features vocalist Esther Satterfield, the arrangements of 'Maui-Waui' or the constant changes in 'Give It All You Got'. Or the simple charm of 'Counselo's Love Theme' or 'Love Note', with its looped theme. Surely a lot of thought has gone behind the creation of these tunes.

Mangione's roots were in jazz, and he was more inclined towards be-bop.  He played in the bands of trumpeter Maynard Ferguson and flautist Hubert Laws, besides Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. His partnership with brother Gap Mangione, a pianist, yielded the albums Hey Baby! and Spring Fever, as far back as 1961.

His celebrity status, of course, came with the 1977 track 'Feels So Good', which reached No 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and lost out to Billy Joel's 'Just The Way You Are' in the Grammy Record of The Year category.

Despite all the twists and turns my jazz listening has taken over the years, Mangione kept coming back. YouTube videos of him playing, wearing his trademark Fedora hat, have always provided relief. Those melodies are priceless, they will never fade away.