I know that’s an unwieldy title, folks…but it at least is an honest one! And it is descriptive, so…here we go.
Chuck Mangione passed away earlier this week at age 84. He played the trumpet and the flugelhorn, was considered one of the first “smooth jazz” or “soft jazz” icons, and played with an uncanny lightness of being. That’s why his mega-hit song “Feels So Good” still shows up in so many different contexts.
As I said yesterday in my blog, Mangione was trained to be a jazz trumpeter first, and played with Art Blakely’s Jazz Messengers. The Jazz Messengers play a very traditional type of jazz that’s usually exemplified by bebop, with some 1950s/early 1960s jazz expressionism (from Miles Davis and John Coltrane; think the LP Kind of Blue and you’re getting somewhere) thrown in.
For those of you who don’t know a lot about music, or jazz in particular, think about trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, he of the tilted-up trumpet. (If you’ve ever seen his signature trumpet, with the bell pointed usually straight up at an angle, you’ll know instantly who I’m talking about.) Dizzy was a great bebop trumpeter and always was; in his youth, he and Charlie Parker made their names playing in the same small group.
So, here’s why I mentioned Dizzy Gillespie, folks. Dizzy was the best of friends with Mangione until the end of his life. Dizzy recognized good music when he heard it, and he didn’t care if it was “too soft” or “not hard enough” or “not swinging enough” for the cognoscenti of the jazz world.
Mangione, mind you, had a great sense of humor, and was often on animated programs sending himself up. He took what he did seriously, but he didn’t take himself seriously, and maybe that’s why his music was so good.
Anyway, you might be asking why I’m talking so much about Mangione when Ozzy Osbourne, who just died at the age of 76, is by far the bigger name. (Rock is just that much more popular than jazz.) Mangione did something different, and not just because he played the flugelhorn more often than his trumpet; because of that, he and Ozzy Osbourne actually have some things in common.
See, Ozzy came up with the famed hard-rock group Black Sabbath. They were perhaps the first heavy metal band to become not only popular, but household names. This was only partly because of the name Black Sabbath (which was picked as it was divisive and memorable, no doubt); it mostly was because they were working on a wholly new style of music, one that was mutating almost faster than thought.
Black Sabbath featured heavier drums, louder and “crunchier” bass playing, and it was set off to perfection by Ozzy’s vocal stylings. The subject matter was often about difficult subjects like death, war, suicide, intense frustration…while such things had been discussed before, they hadn’t been discussed so openly or with so much feeling behind it.
When Ozzy and Black Sabbath parted ways, no one knew, least of all Ozzy, that he’d have a bigger second act by himself than he’d had with Black Sabbath. But that’s what happened, all because he took risks. He sang “Perry Mason,” which had nothing to do with angst or anger and everything to do with nostalgia and how sometimes we really need someone to fix things for us. (Perry Mason was almost legendary in being able to fix nearly anything in a legal context, after all.) He sometimes leaned into his fame, such as with the songs “Crazy Train” and “No More Tears.” He also showed a willingness to work with all sorts of different types of musicians, which is possibly the best thing I could say about him or any other musician as it shows he was more about the music than the fame.
So, Ozzy, with Black Sabbath and without them, was helping to define the new type of music called heavy metal. Mangione was helping to define the new type of jazz, a softer, more inclusive, more melodic jazz that regular people could hear and understand right off.
Both men were all about the music. They also had good senses of humor (Ozzy’s wasn’t known until the reality show about his family, The Osbournes, came into being), played all over the world, were household names (or at least their biggest songs were), and did what they were born to do.
Now, I can see at least some of you shaking your heads, because Ozzy had drug issues, once bit the head off a live bat, and when in some sort of fugue once killed all of the household’s cats. There’s no way Mangione would’ve done those latter things. (I don’t know about the drug issues, mind you, as many musicians of all types have used various types of recreational drugs throughout known history. I can only say I am not aware of it in Mangione’s case.)
That’s all true. But I think one of the reasons we’re on this Earth is to learn, grow, and be the best person we are able to be. Ozzy Osbourne and Chuck Mangione both showed growth throughout their lifetimes, gave pleasure to millions with their music, and were both known at the end of their lives as good people who did the best they could.
I don’t know of a better epitaph than that, and it applies to both men.
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