In Christian art across the centuries, angels have been depicted playing musical instruments: harps, trumpets, and organs. But how is it possible for immaterial beings to hold objects of wood, metal, string and wire? Theologians and music theorists debated at great length the nature of angelic instruments, many arguing that heavenly musical tools must, like their players, be transfigured, ethereal, weightless, playable only by the eternal and audible only to the resurrected.
Earthly music was a partial, passing remedy for humanity’s deafness to the harmony of the spheres and a prelude to the symphony of heaven. The best that could be hoped for by the living was to produce a faint pre-echo of the resounding bliss of the hereafter.
The paradox of angelic music can help to explain the otherworldly success of “Feels So Good” by trumpeter Chuck Mangione, who died last week at the age of 84. On the album cover, Mangione is seen wearing his trademark porkpie hat and hugging his beloved flugelhorn to his chest as if to prove that it is a real, graspable, playable instrument. Yet the sound heard on the record is that of a superlunary spirit blowing not through a coiled brass tube but an instrument miraculously also made of pure air.
Chopped down to three minutes and some from the original studio version that was more than twice as long, the title track of Mangione’s album climbed to near the summit of the charts in the summer of 1978 and enjoyed a long afterlife now extending into the posthumous renaissance of popularity in recent days.
The album as a whole would have ascended to number one if not for the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever, which kept the flugelhornist’s pleasure paean from attaining the top Billboard spot. That movie medley with tracks from the Bee Gees, Kool and the Gang, the Trammps and others was not about the next life, but this one—about “Stayin’ Alive” and the burning desire of “Disco Inferno.” This was music that propelled bodies into motion—strutting, swirling, sweating. “Feels So Good,” by contrast, was permeated by the angelic paradox. Here was an aural lesson—a moralist, might say sermon—in how to feel good without a body.
In the long-running Fox animated series King of the Hill, Mangione played himself, equably (and, one assumes, lucratively) signing up for that show’s running gag that had him transform any tune that he started into “Feels So Good.” Called to play at a funeral in one episode, Mangione dutifully starts into a reverent version of “Taps,” but after a few solemn notes breaks into his exuberant signature tune, as if to confirm the claims of those scholastic authors of yore who believed that heavenly music would be composed of a single endless melody. Part of the joke is that, in the bleak Texan town of King of the Hill, “Feels So Good” becomes the sound of toxic ambrosia. Mangione himself claimed not really to have composed any of his music, but merely acted as a conduit, “the cord between the plug in the wall and the tape recorder,” as he put it, as if he were hearing something directly from above and beyond.
The opening of Mangione’s most famous track in the extended version suggested an awakening—an angel ruffling its ultra-gossamer feathers and stretching its wings, filling its flugelhorn with ecstatic breath to the whisper of a guitar, plucked harp-like. Perfectly packaged in the studio, this music seemed to require no exertion whatsoever to achieve this surfeit of good feeling, even as Mangione’s melody leapt up to those high notes and held them assuredly before fluttering effortlessly down. No surprise then that before its ascent up the pop charts, “Feels So Good” had been number one in the Easy Listening category. The archetypal Smooth Jazz hit embraced the very contradiction of that ominous term.
The three-and-a-half-minute single starts differently, in a euphoric rush of guitar caresses and lite Latin percussion, with a wafting, flute-like melody from a synth, also played by Mangione. Onto this cumulus cloud flew the flugelhornist, its entrance preceded by a tinkling chorus of angelic bells.
Somewhat more vigorous bass lines, snatches of counterpoint, and slightly more buoyant grooves infused the ensuing conclave with puffs of light vigor, but none of this gritless funk was demanding to the listener.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FExBwfQHX1E
In the extended studio version, Mangione allotted space for high-energy improvised solos from his sidemen, saxophonist Chris Vadala and guitarist Grant Geissman. Mangione displayed snatches of his impressive skills as an improviser only in the closing vamp, his mellowed bebop bursts not long enough to complicate the easy delights. The sonic smiles and gentle shouts of joy among the ensemble slowly faded out, receding into a happy haze. This music could never be brought to an end. Beamed down from a studio in heaven, it would go on forever.
Many famous composers have planned their own funeral playlist. Mangione’s “Feels So Good” resounds in the terrestrial realm in the aftermath of his death, as he certainly knew it would. I have not been able to escape that dirgeless three-minute instrumental motet in the past few days. Its strains lifted my thoughts not up to heaven but back to the terrors of my 1978 middle school mixer.
As an antidote to this relentless upbeatenness, I searched out Mangione on the road a dozen years before his biggest hit, not in the studio but live at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach in 1966 as one of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Mangione had been recommended to the famed drummer and bandleader by Dizzy Gillespie, who had met the teenage prodigy a decade earlier in Rochester, New York, where Mangione was born and died. So impressed with the youngster, Gillespie gifted the youngster a horn like his, one with an upward-angled bell. Gillespie would remain Mangione’s lifelong mentor and musical inspiration.
Immortalized on the record Buttercorn Lady, the Jazz Messenger line-up that night in California made for a formidable, fabulous constellation. Blakey was urgently irrepressible as ever, whether with sticks or brushes, or in a soft-mallet solo of inexorable crescendo towards the volcanic sublime. At the piano Keith Jarrett ranged across myriad moods and approaches—carving out endless lines with classic bebop incisiveness; praying in gospel tones; strumming chords inside the instrument (a first for a Messenger keyboardist?); working against Blakey’s beat in squarely robotic figures as if his metronome his were awry but then suddenly setting it right in epiphanies of swing. Saxophonist Frank Mitchell, tragically murdered a few years later at the age of 27, was fleet and fantastic. Later expatriated to Europe, bassist Reggie Johnson proved himself ever propulsive at the brisk tempos, moody and resonant at the slower ones.
Let’s skip over heaps of diverse riches on this remarkable, if underappreciated LP, flip it to the B side and drop the YouTube needle at the Rodgers and Hart standard, “My Romance.” Mangione fits to his trumpet a Harmon mute, and starts off alone with the same three-note figure that would later be heard millions of times at the beginning of “Feels So Good.” A consummate song stylist, Mangione demonstrates a suave sense of elaboration and space, an affection for the fragile beauty of the long tones held over Mitchell’s countermelody and interlaced by Jarrett’s keyboard garlands. The trumpeter’s ornaments whisper, smile and sigh.
The ballad bolts into a swinging affair to the snap of Blakey’s snare and a flurry of get-along triplets. Buoyed by Johnson’s walking line, Mangione contours in and around the bounce of Jarrett’s backing, mixing breathy, minimalist Miles Davis with kaleidoscopic Dizzy. Yet Mangione sounds just like himself in the sum of these parts.
The Lighthouse audience—the tiniest fraction of the double platinum numbers of 1978 and beyond, never mind the radio play—enthuses over this music made in real space and time. There is nothing angelic in this art of immediacy and emotion, technique and truth. The then of 1966 comes alive in the here-and-now, easy to listen to but artfully challenging the listener, even into the forever.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
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