Jazz legend Chuck Mangione, known for 'Feels So Good,' dies at 84
NEW YORK (AP) — Two-time Grammy Award-winning musician Chuck Mangione, who achieved international success in 1977 with his jazz-flavored single “Feels So Good” and later became a voice actor on the animated TV comedy “King of the Hill,” has died. He was 84.
Mangione died at his home in Rochester, New York, on Tuesday in his sleep, said his attorney, Peter S. Matorin of Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP. The musician had been retired since 2015.
Perhaps his biggest hit — “Feels So Good” — is a staple on most smooth-jazz radio stations and has been called one of the most recognized melodies since “Michelle” by the Beatles. It hit No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and the top of the Billboard adult contemporary chart.
“It identified for a lot of people a song with an artist, even though I had a pretty strong base audience that kept us out there touring as often as we wanted to, that song just topped out there and took it to a whole other level,” Mangione told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2008.
He followed that hit with “Give It All You Got,” commissioned for the 1980 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, and he performed it at the closing ceremony.
Mangione, a flugelhorn and trumpet player and jazz composer, released more than 30 albums during a career in which he built a sizable following after recording several albums, doing all the writing.
He won his first Grammy Award in 1977 for his album “Bellavia,” which was named in honor of his mother. Another album, “Friends and Love,” was also Grammy-nominated, and he earned a best original score Golden Globe nomination and a second Grammy for the movie “The Children of Sanchez.”
Mangione introduced himself to a new audience when he appeared on the first several seasons of “King of the Hill,” appearing as a commercial spokesman for Mega Lo Mart, where “shopping feels so good.”
Mangione, brother of jazz pianist Gap Mangione, with whom he partnered in The Jazz Brothers, started his career as a bebop jazz musician heavily inspired by Dizzy Gillespie.
“He also was one of the first musicians I saw who had a rapport with the audience by just telling the audience what he was going to play and who was in his band,” Mangione told the Post-Gazette.
Mangione earned a bachelor's degree from the Eastman School of Music — where he would eventually return as director of the school’s jazz ensemble — and left home to play with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.
He donated his signature brown felt hat and the score of his Grammy-winning single “Feels So Good,” as well as albums, songbooks and other ephemera from his long and illustrious career to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in 2009.