In his book, The 101 Best Jazz Albums, Len Lyons says that Mangione "has come to represent the fusion of jazz with popular song writing and arranging. … [From] 1970 to 1973 Mangione auspiciously combined his natural melodicism with a talent for creating multistylistic orchestral backgrounds."
Lyons recommends Mangione's album, The Best of Chuck Mangione (Mercury), which is available only in vinyl. As Jim Determan (who updated the Lyons list for CD) points out, only half of the songs on that album have been released on CD. As an alternative, Determan recommends Land of Make Believe (Mercury), which is available from Amazon.com.
Mangione plays "And in the Beginning" — a composition that Lyons said "proved Mangione was a composer to be taken seriously" — here:
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