Chuck Mangione — the flugelhorn-playing, Rochester-born jazz star who’d soon become impossible to avoid on pop radio — played Melody Fair’s famous rotating stage in North Tonawanda a year before “Feels So Good” turned him into a household name. Playing Western New York wasn’t just a tour stop for Mangione; it was close to home, a hometown-adjacent crowd cheering on one of their own inside a theater-in-the-round built for exactly this kind of intimate, all-angles show. Melody Fair drew Sinatra, Liberace, and Ella Fitzgerald to that dome — and on this night, it hosted the jazz musician who’d soon out-chart most of them.
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