Music and more with claudecat17 (aka Chris Davlin)!

Here’s the greatest jazz aggregation nobody’s heard of, the Mangione Brothers Sextet with Chuck Mangione, as they were billed on this first Riverside LP back in 1960. They’d be known as the Jazz Brothers with Chuck Mangione on the next two, then they went silent. Chuck resurfaces in 1970 as a whole different thing, now playing flugelhorn rather than trumpet, and focusing more on writing and arranging than with keeping up his jazz chops on trumpet.

Eventually he’d strike gold with “Feels So Good”, a massive hit that you couldn’t have avoided if you tried. It was used in everything! Ads, the Olympics, anything that needed smooth, jazz-ish instrumental backing that even grandma could love. Chuck had several more hits in this brand new smooth jazz genre, then sorta disappeared again until the 90s when he was doing voice acting work on King of the Hill, in which he was hilarious and willing to make light of his own career. I mean, you don’t see Grover Washington, Jr. doing that, now do you? It almost made up for “Feels So Good”!

So that’s Chuck’s career, but on this he’s just one of a very fine group of six musicians, in which everyone shines brightly and never lets up. Every solo is a gem, every bit of the rhythm section tasty as hell and more than ready to step forward and solo too. It’s all at such a high level I haven’t heard another jazz aggregation of that era that tops ’em, that’s for sure! I mean it! I was a little shocked when I first heard these albums mere days ago. It’s way better than I was expecting, and right up there with or even above guys like Jackie McLean or Oliver Nelson, a few of my all time jazz faves, along with Mingus and others… there are a lot!

For me this tune is especially likable. It’s bluesy, simpler than most of the others, and it’s in B flat, which I’ve learned how to deal with. On my phone app I just lower the pitch until the record’s in A! Now everything’s a half step lower, so B flat is A, A flat is G, F is E!!! I feel like I’ve invented the pop tart or something! It’s a fun tune to jam with, that’s for sure, even if I am still quite rusty and possibly even disabled. I have one finger, an important left hand contributor, that just will not bend fully, due to excessive forced button-pushing at a brutal warehouse job I desperately needed mere months ago. I can live with the destroyed right shoulder, but let me have the finger, alright cosmos entities, if you are indeed entities?

I’ll shut up and embed the tune already, which I can hear you clamoring for between the bop phrases dancing through my neurons. Marvel at… well, everything here! There’s no bad stuff anywhere! Even the Russian judges would give ’em perfect 10s! They’d then be shot or droned, but 10s!

Just look at sly ol’ Chuck with his crew cut, looking like he knows stuff… And Gap, front and center, looking like your sister’s volleyball coach that got arrested that one time. It’s a great photo! The next few covers were more creative maybe, with one taken at Letchworth State Park, the Grand Canyon of the East and where I learned to love a very high diving board, but I like the vibe here. You can tell they mean business.