Feb. 19, 1972: Chuck Mangione
A snapshot of this gentle giant just as his star was really starting to shoot into the stratosphere. And for once, the headline writers and the layout people in TV Topics did it up right:
Feb. 19,
1972
Mangione
MAIN
LOBBY of
Hair
streaming down his back, brown wide-brimmed hat, long coat and scarf, boots
peeking from under two inches of rolled-up flannel blue jeans cuffs.
Blue-grey
eyes give his face a mystical clarity. He points a finger at you in a free and
easy greeting. He wants to check out his mail before jazz workshop rehearsal,
but . . .
* * *
FIRST SOMEONE
asks if the Philharmonic is due extra money for the Carnegie Hall show. Next
there’s a rumor that he’s touring in June (“I haven’t got any plans,” he says).
A jazz workshopper introduces her friend. A housewife brings
up two candy-apple-sticky daughters for a handshake. Students come up to say
they can or can’t do this and that. And still others just say “hello.”
“That’s what happens every time I sit out there,” Chuck says
as we cross the alley to the annex.
“It’s getting insane. And teaching 15 hours a week is really
a heavy load. I’m running all the time. If anything else comes along,
something’s gonna have to give.”
Later he looks up from under his
hat at two dozen jazz workshoppers around his high stool: “People, there’s not
enough da de le da AEH-H-H-ah. So let’s go now … a-one, two, three …”
Chuck bobs his head, clicks heels in time to the
student-written number as the horns muster up for next week’s Music Educators
National Conference in
After
* * *
WAITING IN
the corridor when the workshop ends is Debbie from the suburban Penfield high
school paper. She asks “just five minutes.”
Between hellos and people asking for W-2 forms, Chuck gives
Debbie some personal history.
Things like his father being a
How many albums has he made? He counts six – three with older
brother Gap Mangione as The Jazz Brothers in the early ‘60s (Chuck was an
Eastman student then), one with his quartet and, of course, “Friends &
Love” and “Together.”
* * *
CHUCK TELLS
her he can “squawk a note” out of any instrument, but the only ones he plays
publicly are trumpet, flugelhorn and piano.
(He took up flugelhorn, he says during the three-hour WBEN
radio special at 8 p.m. tomorrow, after Miles Davis started using it in the mid
‘60s and now prefers it to the trumpet. Mellower sound.)
“The only enjoyment I get out of touring is to share music
with that many more people,” he says. “I don’t enjoy driving all night. I’d
rather be home with my family.”
We retreat to a nearby Chinese restaurant. “Privacy is hard
to come by,” Chuck observes. “It’s hard to draw a line and say leave me alone.
The worst thing that could happen is if people think you’re not real. I feel
just like anybody else and I like to talk to people.
“The phone at home goes like crazy. It’s hard on Judy – she’s
sorta like the protector. The kids, instead of playing house, they play going
to the concert. They really dig when the quartet comes over.”
Over won-ton soup and Chinese vegetables, Chuck recounts how
rejected he felt as an Eastman student 10 years ago, back before the school
recognized jazz.
* * *
HE RESPONDED
by becoming an indifferent symphonic musician, never really learning writing
and arranging – things which now come hard for him.
After graduation, he freelanced in
“I was exposed to professional musicians a lot at an early
age and I saw the insecurity of it,” he says. “I saw guys getting up in years
and wondering how they’d make a living when they quit going on the road. I saw
music ed as an insurance policy.”
* * *
FIRST HE
taught at the Hochstein School of Music, then put together his quartet and
organized an all-city, all-county jazz ensemble. That caught attention in 1968
at Eastman, whose jazz workshop just played its first concert. In white ties
and tails.
“Now we look the way we want to look,” he says. “These are
ripening years for the kids and they ought to be as open as possible and get to
experiment in as many areas of music as possible.”
The rush of fame began in 1969 with Chuck’s “Kaleidoscope”
concert, something he staged to perform some music he’d written. That led to a
Rochester Civic Music Association invitation to do something with the
Philharmonic.
Restricted by the CMA budget, he wound up paying for extra
rehearsal time and music printing.
* * *
“EVERYBODY
thinks I’m swinging now,” he says. “They don’t know that when you’re paying 60
orchestra musicians and soloists, there isn’t that much left. But I’d gladly do
it all over again knowing that I’d lose $2,500.”
The result was “Friends & Love.” Brother Gap’s record
company pressed the album (now up for a Grammy Award) from the four-track
back-up recording the WXXI-TV videotape people used at the wildly-cheered
concert.
* * *
“When I heard it, I was stunned for a day,” Chuck says. “I
felt like somebody had cut me in half. Actually, it was a pretty tasteful cut.
And if it wasn’t for that guy, people wouldn’t have heard the song or bought
the album.”
* * *
“TOGETHER”
was a reunion last spring of the “Friends & Love” cast. Also videotaped,
it’s due April 17 on WNED-TV, Channel 17. Chuck feels this time he gave his
quartet and the soloists more freedom to be themselves.
And that was the music that went to Carnegie Hall two weeks
ago, playing to a crowd that included Charles Mingus, Gil Evans and Chuck’s old
boyhood idol, Dizzy Gillespie.
“My music hasn’t changed a whole lot,” Chuck says. “In fact,
‘Firewatchers’ I wrote in 1964 and it fits right in. But I think my attitude
toward people is different now.
“Getting off on people is a whole other experience to me. The
happiest moments I’ve known in my life is making people feel good.
“I think my mom is an example of that. You could walk into the house with 50 people and in an hour she’d be feeding all of them. I’d like to be able to give to people that way.”
The box/sidebar:
Planned Like a Space Shot
They’d planned it all like a space shot, but as zero hour
slid past one Friday night last December, the snow sweeping
The anxiety drifted from carefully progressive program
director Bruce Wexler over to shaggy-haired 25-year-old creative director Lee
Zimmerman and then to warm-voiced afternoon show host Bill Masters – could
Chuck Mangione and his entourage make it all the way from
* * *
AND NOBODY
knew quite what to expect of Mangione. Wexler, who started it all, had been
pleasantly amazed on meeting him at a cocktail party after a
“I had this picture of him as a freaked-out musician,” he
remarks, “but this guy is a regular kind of person.”
Surprise, relief, joy as the long-coated figure in his
familiar wide-brimmed hat arrived, not by the front door but via the short-cut
employee entrance, 20 minutes delayed by the storm. No clutter of hangers-on,
just Mangione.
“Until we got into the studio,” Wexler recalls, “I didn’t
know what we wanted to do. But as the two-hour interview between him and Bill
Masters passed, we saw the possibility of a great spectacular. We felt, ‘Here
is a giant growing up in our own backyard.’”
So Lee Zimmerman – on weekends and in between his regular
commitments on commercials and such – began two months of intense work that he
says few other stations in the nation would allow enough time for.
* * *
WHY WOULD WBEN
do this? Wexler will tell you about being communicators and feeling the pulse
of the community and the “Jesus Christ Superstar” special last spring.
And Lee, who’s worked at a variety of stations, will say:
“They’re genuine, knowledgeable people here at WBEN.”
Aided by veteran engineer Murray Wilkinson, Lee studiously
pieced interview and music into a three-hour portrait as artfully and
off-handedly real as Mangione himself. It will be on WBEN and WBEN-FM from 8 to
11 tomorrow night with a minimum of station breaks.
“I’m supposed to be a seasoned radio veteran,” Lee says, “but
I was like a little kid that night we first played it for the newspaper
critics. I couldn’t eat. It wasn’t another Lee Zimmerman sales job. I dug this
guy so much I didn’t want to change what he is.
“He’s like another guy who does all the things you do and
sometimes you wish you could express it all, but you can’t, so you’re glad there’s
a guy like him to do it with words and music.”
* * * * *
FOOTNOTE: My first interview with a major music maker,
made easier by the fact that I was long familiar with him already, having been was a fan of his brother Gap’s group, the Jazz Brothers, back in the early
1960s. Hanging out with him in
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