Chuck Mangione - Everything for Love (Hybrid SACD) * * *

Chuck Mangione's Final Album Everything for Love on Hybrid SACD from Chesky Records

The final album recorded by the late double-Grammy-winning Chuck Mangione, Everything for Love, was the flugelhorn maestro's second outing for Chesky Records, a New York label renowned for it's audiophile-quality recordings and for cutting it's artists live in what producer David Chesky described as "reverberant spaces" using a single microphone.

Recorded in St. Peter's Church, Chelsea, New York, in 2000, Everything for Love reunited Mangione with some of the musicians who had played with him in the '70s - saxophonist/flutist Gerry Niewood, guitarist Grant Geissman, and bassist Charles Meeks - and featured mostly original material. Highlights include "Peggy Hill," which Mangione composed for the animated sitcom King of the Hill; "Slo Ro," a portrait of Mangione's wife Rosie; and the album's only cover, a soulful, gospel-tinged rendition of the hymn "Amazing Grace," where Mangione takes the listener to church. Everything for Love is a fitting musical epitaph for Mangione, who died in 2025.