It’s Your Life : GOOD FEELINGS : Mangione Will Bring His Jazz Pedigree to the Ventura Theatre

It was one of those proverbial fluke hits.

When Chuck Mangione’s frothy “Feels So Good” struck airplay pay dirt in the late ‘70s, the trumpeter and fluegelhorn player was already a known commodity in jazz circles and beyond, and the song itself was hardly esoteric, but still . . . for an instrumental to shoot up the charts so rapidly defied cultural logic.

The truth is, Mangione had a feel-good anthem on his hands, a pop-jazz confection that probably helped pave the way for the Kenny Gs of the world.

Now the song must be a blessing and a curse for the Rochester, N.Y-based musician, who bowed out of the public eye around 1990 after a long slide into relative obscurity, and whose return to action in this area brings him to the Ventura Theatre at 8 p.m. Friday. He played his first Southland concert in years in Costa Mesa last September.

Mangione will be remembered for “Feels So Good,” but it should be pointed out that his jazz pedigree includes an early stint with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and that such work as “Land of Make Believe,” from the early ‘70s, showed a musician with a refined lyricism at work.

It’s a law of the cultural universe that musicians be defined by their biggest hits, but in Mangione’s case, there is much more than feeling good in his past and, hopefully, his future.

* Chuck Mangione at the Ventura Theatre, 26 S. Chestnut St. in Ventura, at 8 p.m. Friday; $18.50; 648-1888.