Chuck Mangione, whose limpid fluegelhorn ruled the upper reaches of Billboard’s adult contemporary charts in the 1970s and ’80s with a culture-permeating lilt that helped create the genre known as “smooth jazz,” died on Tuesday at his home in Rochester, N.Y. He was 84.

His death was confirmed by his family in a statement, which did not specify a cause.

Mr. Mangione was a true pop star with an instantly recognizable signature silhouette: bewhiskered, his long hair crowned by a turned-down felt fedora. He was nominated 14 times for Grammy Awards and won twice: in 1976 for best instrumental composition, “Bellavia,” and in 1978 for best pop instrumental performance, for the title track from his score to the film “The Children of Sanchez.”

Mangione hits could be grandiose, like “Land of Make Believe,” or lightly funky, like the aptly named “Feels So Good,” a Top 10 hit in 1978. Always melodic, his cotton-candy hooks could bore into listeners’ senses with a mood-elevating rush.

Mr. Mangione’s smooth jazz borrowed extensively from fusion — the infusion of electronic instruments into the jazz mainstream that Miles Davis had spearheaded in the late 1960s — dosing it with gossamer Flamenco-ish guitar and a “Disco” backbeat, the perfect sonic pillow for his lyrical fluegelhorn. The result was a pop-jazz hybrid with enormous commercial appeal.

“Feels So Good,” released in October 1977 as the title track off what quickly became a double-platinum album, made Mr. Mangione a superstar and cemented his style. It was infused with jazzlike licks but light on true jazz improvisation. Still, it brought the notion of jazz to a vast music-buying public that, for at least a decade, had been focused almost exclusively on rock ’n’ roll and its offshoots.

Mr. Mangione’s jazz roots ran deep. His earliest work had been as a trumpeter in the 1960s in the big bands of Woody Herman and Maynard Ferguson and Art Blakey’s quintet (which also included a young Keith Jarrett on piano), and he knew how to blow. Stardom in the record business did not ultimately gratify him.

“I would get a lot of calls from different companies,” he recalled. “‘Oh, yeah, Chuck, you started that ‘smooth jazz’ sound and we’d love to have you. Here’s what we’d like to do: We’d like the tempo to be like this and it’s got to have this sound, and a juggler and three elephants, and …’ I was not excited about that.”

Mr. Mangione even became his own cartoon caricature, appearing as a version of himself in the long-running prime-time animated Fox sitcom “King of the Hill.” The running gag was that, whatever song this Mangione manqué began to play, it segued inescapably into “Feels So Good.”

Mr. Mangione also wrote music that underscored two Olympics: “Chase the Clouds Away,” for the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal, and “Give It All You Got,” which he performed live for the globally televised closing ceremony of the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, N.Y. That performance won him an Emmy and became his second Top 40 hit.

Charles Frank Mangione was born on Nov. 29, 1940, in Rochester. His father, Frank, worked for Eastman Kodak, and his mother, Nancy (Bellavia) Mangione, worked at Samson United, the Rochester-based home appliance manufacturer, before the two of them opened a grocery store, Mangione’s Market.

His music-loving parents enrolled Chuck in music school when he was 8. At age 10, he saw the Kirk Douglas film “Young Man With a Horn” and decided that he wanted to play the trumpet. His older brother, Gaspare, a budding pianist known to the family as Gap, became his at-home performing partner.

Mr. Mangione’s father soon began taking his sons to the nearby Ridgecrest Inn, where jazz luminaries like Miles Davis, Art Blakey and Dizzy Gillespie played regularly. “My father would walk up to someone like Dizzy and say: ‘Hi, Mr. Gillespie. These are my two sons and they can play.’ And we would sit in,” Mr. Mangione recalled in a 1999 interview with JazzTimes magazine.

“Then,” he continued, “my dad would invite everyone to our house for spaghetti and homemade wine. Dad had a grocery store attached to the house, and Mother loved to cook, so we could have a party in a minute. This week it would be Dizzy, the next week Carmen McRae, then Sarah Vaughan, Art Blakey, Kai Winding.”

It was Mr. Gillespie who became his mentor — “my musical father,” as Mr. Mangione put it. As a gift, Mr. Gillespie gave the 15-year old Mr. Mangione one of his trademark upswept trumpets.

While still in high school, the Mangione brothers formed a quintet, the Jazz Brothers. Chuck then proceeded to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester in 1958, graduating in 1963 with a bachelor’s degree in music. It was at Eastman that he first picked up the fluegelhorn.

Through the admiring efforts of the great saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, the brothers also began recording for Jazzland, a subsidiary of Riverside Records, while the younger Mangione was still at Eastman. They released their first album, “The Jazz Brothers,” in 1960, and two more, “Hey Baby” and “Spring Fever,” the next year.

Chuck Mangione headed for New York City after graduating and joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1965 on Mr. Gillespie’s recommendation. The next year, he did some arranging for the Outsiders, a Cleveland-based garage-rock band, including on a single, “Help Me Girl,” which cracked the Billboard Top 40.

A few years later, as he increasingly focused on the fluegelhorn, Mr. Mangione formed a quartet that included the saxophonist and flutist Gerry Niewood. He also returned to the Eastman School as director of its jazz ensemble.

In 1970, he conducted and performed with the Rochester Philharmonic in a concert of his own music that showcased his melding of jazz, pop, folk and classical. A recording was made of the event and, though Mr. Mangione later insisted that it was “never initially intended to be an album,” one was privately released under the title “Friends and Love.” Mercury Records picked it up, leading to a record deal and Mr. Mangione’s first Grammy nomination, in 1971, for the track “Hill Where the Lord Hides.”

In 1973, he released “Land of Make Believe,” an orchestral suite essentially, with enrapturing vocals by Esther Satterfield; it had been recorded at Massey Hall in Toronto (the site of a famous 1953 concert by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker). “Land of Make Believe” received widespread airplay on alternative-rock FM radio stations and helped get Mr. Mangione signed to Herb Alpert’s A&M label. (Mr. Alpert was a sometime-flugelhornist himself.) With A&M, Mr. Mangione went on to record his most successful albums, “Chase the Clouds Away” in 1975 and “Feels So Good.”

The ensuing popular pandemonium overwhelmed Mr. Mangione. “Toward the end, I felt numb,” he acknowledged to JazzTimes. “It was like I was on a merry-go-round. Somebody would hand me a schedule and I’d get on a plane, go to a hotel and order room service. It was time to recharge my batteries.”

In 1989, after cutting a live recording at the Village Gate in New York, he stepped away for a four-year sabbatical that ended only with the death of Dizzy Gillespie. “Just before Dizzy died in January 1993, he told me, ‘Next year, you and I are going to be back,’” Mr. Mangione said. “I went back to playing concerts and clubs in 1994.”

The subsequent years brought reunion tours and performances large and small, but nothing approaching his 1970s success. His return included a reticence about recording that resulted in only a handful of new releases.

“I didn’t want to record something I didn’t like,” Mr. Mangione said, “because if it became a hit, I wouldn’t be happy playing it.”

In February 2009, he lost two sidemen, Mr. Niewood and the guitarist Coleman Mellett, in a plane crash near Buffalo. Their deaths haunted him.

He remained a Rochester resident to the end, teaching at Eastman and performing locally — including in what he called “Cat in the Hat” matinees for children. “No one can get in without a kid,” he would note. “We play our music and talk about it, then get them up onstage to try to get a sound out of the instruments.”

Mr. Mangione is survived by his daughters , Nancy Piraino and Diana Smith; a sister, Josephine Shank; his brother, Gap; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. His wife, Rosemarie, died in 2015.

“I’ve written probably 95 percent of the music I’ve played,” Mr. Mangione once said, “but I don’t take credit for writing the music. I feel like the cord between the plug in the wall and the tape recorder; I wait around and hope I get some new information, and then try to present it in the best possible way. I’m very protective of it and don’t put it out there until I feel like it’s really happening.

He added, “Dizzy taught me that if you want to just play whatever you want to play without considering the audience, fine. But if you want to get paid, you’re now in a different ballgame.”

Ash Wu contributed reporting.