Feels So Goodbye

 

Chuck Mangione Quintet - Feels So Good


Hey there! It's me again, your trusty Undertaker.

I know it's only been 48 hours, but did you know 150,000 people die everyday? I can hardly even keep up with the genre-shaping, life-sustaining musicians that are passing away this week faster than the shredders in the White House can pulverize the Epstein Files.

I better write this all down before the next one goes, and I have to sit here for the 12th time this week, remastering some elemental, mind-alteringly awesome concert from their performing heyday or something.

These Wolfgang's Vault of Copyright Assumption shows are something else, too. They're all encoded in disparate, dice-rolling ways that range from lossy sad to the one I have for y'all today, which goes past the range of human hearing with nary a black dot and could pass for a lossless live album to most ears not attached to Rover.

So Chuck Mangione left the coil, mere moments after Ozzy Osbourne. Perhaps Chuck is contributing guest flugelhorn to Ozzy's first afterlife Jazz record, I have no idea. I just wish these beautiful souls would stop departing this plane in such a blasted hurry.

I used to have a shirt like that in 1977 too, Chuck. Unfortunately that's where the similarities end. I can't blow horn like Chuck, or people might today be lamenting my passing after a laudable lifetime, supplying much needed and rare Joy to a rapidly disintegrating anti-culture. And writing florid, deserved tributes to my legendary instrumental, compositional and melodic prowess.

Oh well, when I go they'll just have to marvel at how I spent days of dedicated tedium, muxing the drums from the first 30 seconds of this tape, that the first half of the first tune being missing might feel less disturbing via a more cold, quiet open bubbling up from silence and all.
Do people care about aesthetic stuff like that anymore, or is it just show me the money, the fame and the 12-year-old chicks on the Island of No Accountability these days? It doesn't matter.... when I think of where things in this world are headed, I just put my head down and brew up another slab of Sounds That Time Forgot, lest I lose sight of what I can/can't change.
Anyway, today's unfortunate music death -- ok, yesterday's, but I can't pull two-hour, pristine board tapes from 48 years ago out of my ass in 13 seconds flat, you know -- is/was Chuck Mangione, himself lifelong sultan of the flugelhorn, and author of one of the most beloved instrumental hits that will ever accompany shoppers at The Emporium. You know it, and if not it's nice and audible at the top there, if you just press the handy Play button.
Chuck started as pretty much a straightahead Jazz cat, but as the 1970s progressed he began to shift to what would later dilute into what might be termed the Smoother side of the street.
Not that this concert reflects that tepidity in the slightest; this depicts a far more fiery and dynamic sensibility... before it all stopped feeling so good, and a million less talented players devolved and dumbed it down so it'd fit into a small-capacity elevator.

But once again, no matter. We should be grateful that when iconic players like CM leave us, we have underheard, borderline-earthshaking live documents lurking in corners of the internet to keep their flame burning bright as can be, for as long as can be.

I remember when I was a kid and we moved from Queens to Long Island in April of 1978, when Feels So Good was everywhere. My mom would drive me to school, where I was completing the 6th grade in the one last term in elementary school before graduating and moving away. That song would always be on the radio as we'd drive the miles back into the city in the mornings that Spring, and as I think of it now it's kind of melancholy, that songs without vocals, and with Jazz instrumentation such as that, can't really be popular or on the radio anymore for parents and children to share.
So thanks Chuck, and farewell to you and your flugelhorn, which will live forever. I hope you're up there, showing Ozzy a few of the less obvious intervals, and maybe a couple of the trickier modes.

Chuck Mangione Quintet
The Bottom Line
New York City, New York USA
11.2.1977

01 Hill Where the Lord Hides pt. 2/band introductions
02 Chase the Clouds Away
03 The Day After (Our First Night Together)
04 Legend of the One-Eyed Sailor
05 Soft
06 Hide and Seek (Ready or Not, Here I Come)
07 Feels So Good
08 Maui-Waui
09 The XIth Commandment
10 Bellavia
11 Land of Make Believe
12 Main Squeeze

Total time: 1:57:28
disc break goes after Track 07
Tracks 01-06 are from the early set
Tracks 07-12 are from the late set

Chuck Mangione - flugelhorn & keyboards
James Bradley, Jr. - drums
Chris Vadala - reeds, flute, percussion & keyboards
Grant Geissmann - guitar
Charles Meeks - bass

320/48k audio streamed from Wolfgang's Vault
spectral analysis is somehow lossless past 20 kHz, making this essentially equivalent to a preFM source
converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited, denoised, tracked & remastered by EN, July 2025
697 MB FLAC/direct link

I hope this is a fitting Fusion Eulogy for our fallen hero, who floated away yesterday at 84. I think it sounds tremendous, with all the hallmarks of what makes the music of Chuck Mangione stand out in a somewhat maligned area of the Jazz universe.

I'll be back during the week with one more milestone birthday for July, but I couldn't wait on a tribute to this incredible player, who took us to a pretty sweet Land of Make Believe during his time in sound, down here on the ground.--J.

11.29.1940 - 7.22.2025