Chuck Mangione – “Give It All You Got”

The flugelhorn is an odd little instrument. It’s a member of the brass family, a German descendant of the traditional English hunting bugle, shaped like a cornet but pitched closer to a French horn. (For you non-band geeks, just imagine a fat trumpet.) British-style brass bands in the 19th century used the flugelhorn extensively; later, Joe Bishop and the great Clark Terry pioneered its use in jazz. Miles Davis played one for a few years in the late Fifties. So did Chet Baker. Marvin Stamm even got the flugelhorn to #1 in 1971, thanks to his screwball solo midway through Paul McCartney’s wonderfully eccentric “Uncle Albert/ Admiral Halsey.” (That one is a 9.) But mostly, the instrument stayed in the shadows, a weird step-cousin of the extended horn clan, with none of the cool or cachet of the mighty trumpet.

One jazz musician, however, famously embraced the flugelhorn and never looked back. Chuck Mangione first arrived on the scene as a trumpeter in Art Blakey’s legendary Jazz Messengers ensemble. By 1968, he’d quit both group and trumpet to focus exclusively on a different type of horn. Mangione put together his first quartet the following year. Less than a decade later, he would write and record the most famous flugelhorn song of all time.

In the spring of ‘78, “Feels So Good” hit #4 on the Hot 100 and went to #1 on Billboard’s “Easy Listening” chart, a remarkable feat for any horn player not named Herb Alpert. But that was just the beginning. “Feels So Good” went on to seep into the public consciousness in a way that even Alpert’s biggest hits never did. Mangione’s smooth-jazz earworm might be the most recognizable brass melody of the last hundred years, possibly the most recognizable instrumental of the entire post-swing era not attached to a movie or television show. Even if you don’t like jazz, even if you’ve never heard the name “Chuck Mangione,” you absolutely know “Feels So Good.” (Feel free to click on the hyperlink and confirm for yourself.) It’s a tune that has moved beyond the confines of pop music to become a part of the atmosphere, liable to float into your head at random and stay lodged up there for days afterwards. (On second thought, maybe don’t click that link.)

“Feels So Good” turned its creator, briefly, into a mainstream sensation, the rare jazz musician rewarded with pop star treatment. Mangione scored platinum albums and won Grammy Awards. He played late-night talk shows, sporting events, and Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. He, his flugelhorn, and his trademark floppy hat all appeared together on an episode of Magnum, P.I., which is every bit as ridiculous and amazing as you’d expect.

Mangione even composed the official theme for the 1980 Winter Olympics, held in Lake Placid for two weeks in February. A month after the Games’ completion, that same theme song, “Give It All You Got,” became his second Top 20 hit. Dismiss the man’s lightweight version of jazz if you must, but the hard-bop players Mangione grew up admiring never came within a hundred yards of a crossover pop smash. Chuck had two in as many years.

Charles Frank Mangione grew up in Rochester, NY, alongside his older brother, Gap, who would eventually become a respected jazz pianist in his own right. Oddly, neither one of their parents possessed any musical background or inclination. But they supported their sons completely, enrolling both boys in lessons and encouraging their budding household attempts at improvisation. Eventually, Frank Mangione decided his sons should experience the real thing, so he began escorting them to the nearby Ridgecrest Inn, where jazz greats like Davis and Blakey often performed. Dizzy Gillespie soon became a family friend, stopping over on Sundays for spaghetti, wine, and jam sessions with a 15-year-old Chuck. Gillespie later gifted one of his signature “upswept” trumpets to the young musician; Mangione would hereafter call the legendary horn player “my musical father.”

By the late Fifties, Chuck was attending Eastman School of Music while simultaneously playing in the Jazz Brothers, a combo he’d formed with Gap while still in high school. The Jazz Brothers recorded three under-the-radar albums before Chuck moved on to Blakey’s “New” Jazz Messengers, where he stayed from 1965-68, composing three of the six tracks on the group’s only album from this period, 1966’s Buttercorn Lady. As the Messengers’ commercial fortunes declined, Mangione returned to Eastman, this time serving as chair of the college’s jazz program. In 1970, his local showcase “Friends & Love” caught the attention of Mercury Records, who signed him to a four-album deal. The first record under that deal would be a live recording of that same orchestral work, titled Friends & Love… A Chuck Mangione Concert; its opening number, “Hill Where The Lord Hides,” gave Chuck his first Grammy nomination—and Hot 100 single (peaking at #76)—a year later.

In 1975, frustrated at Mercury’s inability to expand his audience beyond jazz circles, Mangione switched to A&M Records, a label famously co-owned by another horn player, Herb Alpert. In the Sixties, Albert had taken five separate albums to #1; he knew a few things about getting jazz to a wider audience. Mangione’s seven-year tenure with the company—a time when he enjoyed free rein in the studio and a relatively high level of promotion—represented both his critical and commercial peak. His first A&M record, Chase The Clouds Away, sold a million copies and garnered two Grammy nominations. The next one, Bellavia, resulted in his first win: “Best Instrumental Composition” for the title track. By 1978’s Feels So Good, Mangione managed to score the first “Record Of The Year” nod for a non-vocal song since Henry Mancini a decade earlier.

“Feels So Good” still feels like one of the flukiest successes in Billboard history, a nearly ten-minute jazz instrumental that got edited down to 3:28 and blew up on Top 40 in the Year Of Disco. A&M’s initial assessment of the album pointedly bemoaned its lack of singles; Mangione described the editing process needed to get the song down to radio-friendly length as “major surgery.” As he detailed in a 2001 interview, the resulting airplay happened entirely by accident:

“The Bee Gees completely saturated radio with Saturday Night Fever. I mean, probably six out of the top 10 songs were from that album. Somebody at the record company edited down my nine-minute version of “Feels So Good”… [and] program directors were trying to find something that would fit next to the other stuff. Then, all of a sudden, everybody started playing “Feels So Good.” So, there was no scientific formula here.”

To this day, I’m still surprised exactly how “Feels So Good” went from easy-listening curiosity to legit chart monster, but I think I’ve got a good grasp on the why. Mangione’s lite-jazz approach smoothed over the rough edges inherent to the genre; his crack quartet nestled into a bouncy groove midway between “island getaway” and “upscale hotel lounge.” In short, “Feels So Good” hit multiple quadrants of the 1978 radio landscape without truly offending anyone. Audiences got some heavy disco backbeat in the track’s uptempo sections, a bit of Weather Report’s unison syncopation in the secondary part, and even a splash of true fusion from underrated guitarist Grant Geissman. But honestly, the appeal of “Feels So Good” was simpler still: Mangione landed on an insanely catchy melody, then performed the hell out of it. (That melody also means assigning a rating to this song feels incredible odd, like rating the Nationwide jingle or the theme from The Price Is Right. An 8, I guess?)

If “Feels So Good” succeeded for organic reasons, the chart placement of “Give It All You Got” appears far more calculated, like the end result of a presubscribed formula: Major network + huge prime-time event + exposure = Hit song. Mangione was already on ABC’s radar by 1976, when the network used “Chase The Clouds Away” as bumper music during their coverage of the Summer Olympics in Montreal. Four years later, with his public profile substantially higher and the Winter Olympics on American soil, ABC Sports asked the flugelhornist to compose the official theme song for the XIII Olympic Winter Games. Mangione came back with “Give It All You Got,” and A&M, smartly, released the single one month prior to the start of the Games.

Lake Placid, of course, wound up being the site of the dramatic “Miracle On Ice,” where a team of amateur U.S. hockey players beat the mighty Soviet squad 4-3 in one of the greatest upsets in sports history. The tape-delayed broadcast on February 22, 1980, remains the most watched hockey game ever shown on American television; Team USA’s victory over Finland, two days later, ranks second. And just hours after the conclusion of that second, gold-medal-clinching match, Mangione performed “Give It All You Got”—along with several other songs—at the closing ceremonies. That’s the kind of national exposure money can’t buy. (Although a little more cash might’ve really improved those rinky-dink festivities.) “Give It All You Got” cracked the Top 40 three days after the start of the 1980 Winter Olympics. By the time the Games finished, it would be sitting at #1 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart.

Mangione later explained that his inspiration for “Give It All You Got” was “to think about the athletes and their efforts to do their best now. They’re giving it all they’ve got.” That explains the title, I guess, but it still doesn’t connect the composition to Lake Placid in any meaningful way. For an official Olympic song, “Give It All You Got” seems distinctly lacking in pomp and circumstance, with none of the instrumental gravitas of, say, John Williams’ “Olympic Fanfare and Theme,” commissioned four years later for the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles. (There’s a reason Williams’ composition became iconic and Mangione’s did not.) At no point does the music approach the stadium-rattling glory of Queen’s best anthems, or deliver the adrenaline rush of Bill Conti’s scores for the various Rocky movies. (Hell, Survivor’s contribution would’ve worked better. Either one.) In fairness, numerous other “Olympic theme songs”—from artists as varied as Muse, Celine Dion, and even Björk—would go on to fall equally short in this department. Plus, all of them were absolutely terrible. “Give It All You Got” is definitely not terrible, but it’s still unassuming to a fault, a modest tune ill-suited to the magnitude of a global sporting event.

Truthfully, “Give It All You Got” might be the only official Olympic song that makes more sense playing over the opening credits of a Seventies cop show. This is fusion jazz at its most peppy and pristine, the network TV version of “gritty.” Mangione and saxophonist Chris Vadala volley the theme back and forth for nearly half the track’s six-minute runtime, content to let that breezy melody do most of the work. There’s some inspired composition going on beneath the surface: the way the chord structure keeps dancing between major and minor, the spots where flugelhorn and sax each converge in twin harmony. Throw in Charles Meeks’ slippery bassline and some Nile-Rodgers-style rhythm work from Geissman, and you’ve got the perfect soundtrack for cruising L.A. in a ’74 Stingray convertible.

As with “Feels So Good,” A&M chopped out large chunks of “Give It All You Got” to get the 7” single down to a reasonable 3:55. That meant losing Geissman’s supremely tasty guitar solo, along with Mangione’s own, strangely sleepy performance. (The downside to hiring top-notch players: You wind up the weakest link in your own song.) Fortunately, Vadala’s skillful, skittering sax break survived intact, but his welcome jolt of energy lasted all of thirty seconds: not near enough time to give the 7” anything resembling real, jazz-centric variation. The radio edit turned “Feels So Good” into a smash. The edit of “Give It All You Got” just took an already straight-laced song and made it straighter still.

In some respect, it feels churlish to complain about “Give It All You Got,” the Platonic ideal for fun, carefree, inessential background music. But there’s something deeply frustrating in the way this strange hodge-podge of jazz and funk refuses to commit to either genre. The groove stays stiff and brittle, the production overly polished. There’s no looseness, no swing, no grime beneath the fingernails. “Give It All You Got” boasts chops for days, but the execution is simply too polite to deliver the sweat and swagger that would’ve made this track cook. Instead, we’re left with antiseptic funk, the kind that tops the “Easy Listening” chart rather than the R&B one. (Although, in fairness, #32 on “Hot Soul Singles” ain’t half-bad.)

And here’s the kicker: In the closing moments, the song does, belatedly, catch fire. Mangione and Vadala attack one single phrase with newfound urgency, additional handclaps strengthen the backbeat, Geissman slices the upper register, and Meeks slides up and down his bass neck with abandon. That final stretch is truly, legitimately great; it should've been the starting point, not the ending. Extend the excitement of the last thirty seconds over the entire song, and that’s the “Give It All You Got” that Team USA truly deserved.

Chuck Mangione’s time in the spotlight began fading not long after the memory of the Winter Olympics themselves. The last of his thirteen Grammy nominations came in 1980: “Best Instrumental Composition” for “Give It All You Got,” plus “Best Jazz Fusion Performance” for its parent album, Fun & Games. (“Give It All You Got” lost to yet another iconic John Williams work, the soundtrack to The Empire Strikes Back. This is more than respectable.) 1981 found Mangione composing the theme to The Cannonball Run (also respectable); 1982 brought a move to Columbia Records, along with the breakup of his late-Seventies quartet. The resulting string of lackluster albums disappointed fans and killed sales. By 1991, Mangione quit playing altogether.

And then, two years later, his musical father passed away. The death of Dizzy Gillespie propelled Chuck back into touring, as he began to slowly reclaim his artistic legacy one show at a time. Mangione reunited with Meeks and Geissman. He performed with orchestras. He played to older jazz crowds. He put on shows just for kids. He toured in Poland and Korea, where “Feels So Good” remained the country’s most requested instrumental hit. He collected numerous lifetime achievement awards. And in 1997, Chuck Mangione returned to television screens with one of his greatest performances ever: playing himself, in animated form.

GRADE: 5/10

BONUS BITS: King Of The Hill, the charmingly subversive Mike Judge sitcom that ran for eleven seasons on FOX, first featured Mangione in its fifth episode, “Luanne’s Saga.” Chuck would appear on the show ten more times between 1997 and 2003, plus the series finale in 2009. The King Of The Hill version of "Chuck Mangione” shills for Mega Lo Mart, always wears the same red-and-white shirt from the cover of Feels So Good, and chafes under an oppressive contract that requires him to perform at 400 store openings per year, leaving no time for touring or family. Eventually, this Chuck hides out in the Arlen, TX Mega Lo Mart, gets hunted by Dale, and goes into group therapy after the store explodes. (It’s legitimately one of the better character arcs for a musician on any TV show, animated or not.) The idea that King Of The Hill introduced Mangione’s music to a new generation remains, at best, debatable. But the running joke where everything Chuck plays—from “Taps” to “The Star-Spangled Banner”—eventually turns into “Feels So Good” after a few bars? That kills every time.

I WANT MY MTV: I’m not sure if this was an official video or just a “live in the studio” performance captured for some random television program, but it’s still nice to hear “Give It All You Got” shake off some of its studio stiffness in this particular environment. Plus, the clip offers a little insight into the man’s widespread appeal; whether playing flugelhorn, vamping on electric piano, or just clapping along, Mangione was incredibly fun to watch on stage, a true character in every sense of the word.