Chris Vadala was born June 19, 1948, in Poughkeepsie, New York, and trained at the Eastman School of Music, earning both a Performer's Certificate in saxophone and a B.M. in Music Education. He joined Chuck Mangione's internationally touring quartet and spent years on the road with the group, performing in all 50 U.S. states and across Canada, Australia, Japan, the Philippines, China, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. He played the well-known saxophone solo on the band's 1977 hit "Feels So Good," which reached No. 4 on the U.S. charts; his tenure with Mangione's band, whose own story is told in full in Chuck Mangione's JazzProfiles.com profile, produced credits on five gold and two platinum albums and a share of two Grammys, two Emmys, and a Golden Globe.

Vadala went on to appear on more than 100 recordings across saxophone, flute, and clarinet, and by 2018 had spent twenty years as the first-call saxophonist with the National Symphony Orchestra and NSO Pops. In parallel, he built a second career in academia as Director of Jazz Studies and Saxophone Professor at the University of Maryland, a 25-year tenure that transformed the school's jazz program.

Vadala died January 17, 2019, at age 70.

Vadala's classically-trained, versatile reed playing, honed at Eastman, made him equally credible in Mangione's crossover-jazz quartet, in orchestral pops settings with the National Symphony, and in the classroom, one of the clearest examples in this project of a crossover musician whose career spanned performance and formal jazz pedagogy in equal measure.