The Smooth Jazz Angle

As the world pores over the biography and extensive online history of Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, one significant question—significant, at least, for fans of quietly sophisticated flugelhorn music—has gone unanswered: Is the alleged shooter related, even in some distant way, to Chuck Mangione?

Chuck Mangione, of course, is the horn player behind the massively popular 1978 single “Feels So Good,” whose upbeat groove and breezy singalong hook made it the rare instrumental to crack the top 10 of Billboard’s singles chart, and provided an early blueprint for what we now know as smooth jazz. Now 84, Chuck has led an accomplished musical life before and after that smash success, including an early stint in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, a group known for incubating the early careers of some of the world’s greatest musicians. I couldn’t help but think of him when Luigi’s name was first made public as a person of interest in the Thompson investigation. Searching Twitter and Bluesky showed me I wasn’t alone.

Could America’s two most famous Mangiones share a bloodline? It seemed, for some obscure reason, worth trying to find out. The initial evidence pointed, sort of shockingly, to yes. But the more I dug in, the less clear it became.