Chuck Mangione, the prolific jazz musician behind ’70s hit “Feels So Good,” died in his Rochester, NY home in his sleep on Tuesday, a spokesperson for the artist confirmed to People. He was 84.
Mangione was an accomplished trumpet and flugelhorn player who was nominated for 14 Grammys (winning two) over the course of his decades-long career. Born in Rochester in 1940, Mangione first started taking music lessons when he was only eight years old. The musician started with piano, but switched instruments after watching the Kirk Douglas film Young Man With A Horn, per Variety. In high school, he formed a jazz band with his brother, Gap, with whom he released his first of over 30 records, The Jazz Brothers, in 1960.
Mangione’s childhood was also full of musical inspiration in other ways. “[His] father would invite these amazing artists to come home with them for a good home-cooked Italian meal,” his biography reads, per People. “Of course, they were more than happy to eat home cooking after being on the road. Chuck grew up thinking everyone had Carmen McRae and Art Blakey over for dinner.” Mangione also played with Blakely for a stint in the ’60s.
Mangione’s solo career took off the following decade with the release of Friends & Love… A Chuck Mangione Concert, which was nominated for a Grammy in 1971. That album also included his first single to make it to the Billboard Hot 100, “Hill Where the Lord Hides.” He released five albums over the next five years, including Chase The Clouds Away, the title song of which was used at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. That wasn’t his only brush with Olympic fame. In 1980, he was commissioned to write “Give It All You Got,” which was used as the theme song for the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid.
While Mangione won his first Grammy for Bellavia in 1976, it was the following year that saw arguably his biggest success. The album version of “Feels So Good,” released in 1977, is over 9 minutes long, but after what the artist called “major surgery” (per Variety) the instrumental track became a 3:31 hit that reached no. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100.
While Mangione released over a dozen albums after Feels So Good, he’s perhaps best known by a different group of people for playing himself as a recurring character on King Of The Hill. In the animated series, the musician plays a spokesperson for the fictional Mega Lo Mart. “My character would do things like play ‘Taps’ and switch right into ‘Feels So Good,'” Mangione said of his unexpected TV career in an interview with Celebrity Cafe (via Variety). “I figured that since they were playing my music and to such a large audience, why not? So I jumped into the studio in New York; they would call from L.A., and then I’d see a thing that looked like me on the television screen. Many people watch that show, so it is great exposure.”
In the same interview, he also spoke of the great success of “Feels So Good.” “I do not mind having written the song at all. I just wish that I had written it in a different key, as the high D is hard to play,” he said. “I am glad that I wrote something that brought joy to millions of people.”
