Chuck Mangione Biggest Hit Free Improv Territory
While Miles Davis was exploring difficult sonic textures, jazz headed into free improv territory, splitting from tonality in much the same split as befell classical music. Chick Coreas album 'Return to Forever:' explores the use of art-rock and classical music styles in jazz.Earworm first traces the history of the form back to Grover Washington Jr., CTI Records, and other artists like Wes Montgomery. The Pat Metheny Group often features keyboard player Herbie Hancock. Jaco Pastorius played bass with the band Weather Report. His biggest hit was 'Feels So Good.' Chuck Mangione.
Throughout the 1970s, Chuck Mangione was a celebrity. The song also reached the top of the Billboard adult contemporary chart.Chuck Mangione. It contains his hit single, the title song 'Feels So Good', which in an edited form reached No. If Coltrane could break “My Favorite Things” into cubism, surely there was a place for Wes Montgomery to riff over the groove of “Goin’ Out of My Head” by Little Anthony and the Imperials.Feels So Good is a 1977 jazz album released by Chuck Mangione. This also could be seen as an evolution of jazz’s raiding of the Great American Songbook along with Broadway hits.
And from Montgomery we get to George Benson, silky smooth and undeniably funky. His father had often taken Chuck and his older brother. Mangione's records were big sellers yet few of his fans from the era knew that his original goal was to be a bebopper.
It was “smooth sounds for a rough world,” as one adman called it, but what it really was comfort music for office drones.Ironically, the forces that put smooth jazz at the top were responsible for its fall, as new technology to measure radio ratings found it couldn’t pick out the music from the background sounds. Other stations would soon follow suit, reaching a height of popularity in 1994, when Kenny G won Best Adult Contemporary Artist at the American Music Awards. It’s fitting that the west coast was the birthplace in 1987 of the first “smooth jazz” station, KTWV in Los Angeles, 94.7 THE WAVE, home of all sorts of laid-back grooves since the very beginning of jazz and pop. It was in one of those groups that a woman described the music like Benson and Bob James as “smooth jazz,” and the name stuck. As freeform stations were bought out by corporations, market research firms targeted audiences with focus groups. Away - ska bands have always used horn sections and many of the biggest acts in rock.But as Earworm points out, Smooth Jazz only became a thing when marketing stepped in.
The sounds of The Dorseys, Glenn Miller, Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman, even early Artie Shaw. You can also follow him on Twitter at read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.There is something reminiscent of the early Big Band era, pre-WWII, during, and a little after, in it. If you have a hankerin’ to hear some smoothness right now, Vox has a Spotify playlist for what ails you.How Youtube’s Algorithm Turned an Obscure 1980s Japanese Song Into an Enormously Popular Hit: Discover Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love”The History of Spiritual Jazz: Hear a Transcendent 12-Hour Mix Featuring John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Herbie Hancock & MoreJazz Deconstructed: What Makes John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” So Groundbreaking and Radical?Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. If Japan’s City Pop, which trades in similar smooth textures, can speak to the disaffected youth about a deep, affluent wish that never came true, Chuck Mangione can’t be too far behind. At least with soft rock you got songs and tales of heartache.However, it would not surprise me to see Smooth Jazz make a nostalgic, ironic-but-not comeback. But when the dream melted for everybody, smooth jazz evaporated.
We used to listen to WJZZ in Detroit and about 90% of the music was instrumental with some vocals. Not so rare, now, with digital samples abounding, repetitively, as the industry has recognized its marketing strength.Smooth jazz has a history … didn’t start with Kenny ‘G’, nor Grover Washington, but I’ll bet GW knew that.The Smooth jazz genre in my opinion came from contemporary jazz. In those days, at the larger stores, you could get a sample of an album played in the store, to hear if it was something you wanted. He’d stopped buying any music, but after that he got a new ‘player’, and actually went out, some weekends, and looked for things. He’d missed Prokofieff when in college, but when I brought in an album, in the mid-60s, he absolutely loved it.
The idea was to catch pop radio listeners as they were scrolling through the dial and the pop song would grab their attention and then they would hear contemporary jazz artists that they probably never heard of. Then, someone decided to start adding pop vocalist to the Smooth Jazz format like Phil Collins, Michael Bolton and I even heard Bette Midler singing Love TKO that was originally recorded by Teddy Pendergrass. Of course Kenny’s success helped to put Smooth Jazz on the map. Kenny G of course hit it big with getting major pop radio airtime and carved out a huge audience for himself with Clive Davis at the helm of his record label, Arista Records that produced Whitney Houston and many other big pop artists. This was truly the contemporary jazz sound and most of these artists were previously only receiving airplay on some R&B stations that had a contemporary jazz show for a few hours on a Sunday and if the songs were hot, they could find their way into the regular rotation from time to time. The instrumentalists were Grover Washington,Jr., David Sanborn, George Benson, Kenny G, The Rippingtons, Najee, Gerald Albright, Bobby Lyle, Chuck Mangione, etc.
Even the biggest market in the country, New York does not have a smooth jazz station like it used to be. There are only a few major markets right now that even have a smooth jazz radio station. Shortly after that around 1999, many smooth jazz stations had gone off the air. I actually had a recording contract with Atlantic Records in 1996.
Imagine my delight now as I discover that Amazon Music has lots of Smooth Jazz. I also don’t care for hard rock, metallica, rap etc. I do like many other kinds of jazz (dixieland, 40’s, 50’s, etc) but find that much improvisational type jazz is just too dissonant for me. In fact I am sure that a lot of Highly Sensitive Persons, a real scientifically-validated physiological trait that around 20% of people have, also prefer softer music as we are too easily over-stimulated. I have always preferred softer music.
I think there will always be an audience for soft relaxing music – muzak too if you will. Thanks to this article I now understand why and what happened to it.
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