NEW YORK — Chuck Mangione, the Rochester-born jazz trumpeter who rocketed to worldwide fame with his 1978 album “Feels So Good,” has died. He was 84.
Mangione died from natural causes on Tuesday at his home in Rochester, his family told the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle.
Though “Feels So Good” was his most famous composition, Mangione released dozens of albums during his lengthy career and won two Grammy Awards among 14 nominations.
Mangione’s incredible feel for the trumpet and the flugelhorn helped him achieve fame few modern-day jazz musicians could attain. When “Feels So Good” was released in 1978, it reached No. 2 on the charts, behind only one of the best selling albums of all time, the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack.
His 1975 composition “Chase the Clouds Away” was part of the soundtrack to the 1976 Montreal Olympics, but that was far from his only Olympic contribution. At the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, NBC used Mangione’s “Give It All You Got” as its main theme, and Mangione performed the song at the closing ceremony.
Though he obtained worldwide recognition, Mangione spent much of his life in Rochester, and he was inducted into the city’s music hall of fame in 2012.
