EGN NEWS DESK
James Chance, the singer, saxophonist and composer who melded punk, funk and free jazz into bristling dance music because the chief of the Contortions, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 71.
His brother, David Siegfried, stated Mr. Chance had been in declining well being for years and succumbed to issues of gastrointestinal illness on the Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center in East Harlem.
During the late Nineteen Seventies explosion of punk tradition in New York City, the Contortions have been on the forefront of a mode known as no wave — music that got down to be as confrontational and radical in sound and efficiency as punk’s vogue and angle have been visually.
Contortions songs like “I Can’t Stand Myself” and “Throw Me Away” crammed the rhythmic buildings of James Brown’s funk with angular, dissonant riffs, to be topped by Mr. Chance’s yelping, blurting, screaming vocals and his trilling, squawking alto saxophone. He was a stay wire onstage, along with his personal twitchy variations of strikes tailored from Brown, Mick Jagger and his punk contemporaries.
Although the Contortions typically carried out in fits and ties, their music and stage presence have been proudly abrasive. In the band’s early days, Mr. Chance was so decided to get a response from arty, indifferent spectators that he would leap into the viewers and slap or kiss somebody. Audience members typically fought again.
“I bought a giant kick out of frightening individuals, I don’t deny that,” Mr. Chance stated in a 2003 interview with Pitchfork.
Adele Bertei, who performed keyboards within the Contortions, stated: “It was a form of musical Brutalism. We actually needed to destroy concepts of artwork as elitist — and of punk as musically revolutionary, when it actually was nearly a three-chord development.”
Mr. Chance, she added, “was so singular in his musical imaginative and prescient, in his presence, in his will to smash all conformity into items, that he won’t ever be forgotten by anybody who skilled his music stay. It was form of insane, however form of sensible, the physicality of it.”
Mr. Chance was born James Siegfried on April 20, 1953, in Milwaukee. His father, Donald Siegfried, was the enterprise manager for a Wisconsin faculty district. His mom, Jean, taught elementary faculty; she survives him, alongside along with his brother, David, and his sisters Jill Siegfried and Mary (Randy) Koehler.
James Siegfried studied classical piano with nuns in his elementary faculty when he was 7 years outdated; it bored him. But when he was 11, a jazz teacher taught him to play requirements and stride piano. During the late Nineteen Sixties, he soaked up the period’s rock. He briefly attended Michigan State University, then returned to Milwaukee and studied jazz on the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, the place he picked up the alto saxophone and began taking part in free jazz.
Late in 1975, he moved to New York City, drawn by reporting in The Village Voice in regards to the punk-rock incubator CBGB and the loft jazz scene. He frequented each.
“I went to jazz periods at locations just like the Tin Palace, which was a half a block from CBGB’s,” he informed Glenn O’Brien in 2011. “But there was no overlap. Nobody who went to the Tin Palace would ever go to CBGB’s, or vice versa.”
He took classes from a loft jazz grasp, the tenor saxophonist David Murray, and began a jazz group, Flaming Youth. But he disliked the studious jazz viewers.
“He needed individuals to be dancing,” stated Sylvia Reed, a lifelong pal who was briefly Mr. Chance’s manager. “He needed to drag individuals off the ground.”
He additionally quickly realized that “I wasn’t going to make it within the jazz scene,” Mr. Chance stated in 2011. “Too many guys might play sax higher than me.” He met Lydia Lunch, a pioneering no wave performer, at CBGB; shared his Lower East Side condo together with her; and performed together with her band, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, for a lot of 1977. He began the Contortions after Ms. Lunch determined her band didn’t want a saxophone.
By then, he was performing as James Chance. “He needed a stage identify that sounded prefer it may very well be an actual identify, not a foolish punk identify like Rotten,” David Siegfried stated. “He was additionally actually into movie noir, and it match with that.”
Mr. Siegfried added, “Behind that combative stage persona, James was reclusive, shy and softhearted.”
A unfastened motion of boundary-defying musicians and visible artists coalesced as no wave with a sequence of 5 concert events on the Soho gallery Artists Space in May 1978. The sequence was attended by Brian Eno, a producer who selected the Contortions and three different bands — Mars, DNA and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks — to share a compilation album that may endure as a doc of a pivotal inventive second: “No New York.”
Mr. Chance discovered a catalyst in Anya Phillips, a dressmaker and photojournalist who turned his girlfriend and manager, selling the band and honing his theatricality as a frontman. The Contortions commonly crammed New York City golf equipment — principally Max’s Kansas City, which had an ongoing rivalry with CBGB.
“He was a chameleon,” Deborah Harry of Blondie, an occasional visitor singer with Mr. Chance, stated. “He might lure you in with being so cute and so jerky, with the entire downtown factor. But then he would do issues that have been actually very superior musically.”
The band bought a recording contract with Ze Records and in 1979 launched the album “Buy,” which captured crisp studio variations of Mr. Chance’s songs. More raucous stay recordings can be launched after the early Contortions broke up.
Noisy because it appeared, the music was tautly constructed, as Mr. Chance defined to Pitchfork. “Instead of chord adjustments, I wrote an element for every instrument, ranging from the bass and constructing it up from there. Interlocking rhythmic melodies. It’s very structured,” he stated. “Songs are literally all written out in charts.”
Michael Zilkha, the proprietor of Ze Records, prompted Mr. Chance to make a “disco document,” leaving it to Mr. Chance to resolve what that meant. Mr. Chance was effectively conscious of racial tensions between the largely white New York punk scene and Black-rooted jazz and disco; the Contortions made a degree of taking part in cowl variations of R&B songs of their units. Mr. Chance uncovered and challenged the racial divide, naming his disco venture James White and the Blacks and titling the album “Off White,” additionally launched in 1979. Its songs included “White Savages,” “Almost Black,” “White Devil” and “Bleached Black.”
Recorded by the Contortions band and friends together with Ms. Lunch, a lot of the songs moved solely barely nearer to mainstream pop and dance music. But the group did rework a jagged Contortions track, “Contort Yourself,” with a disco beat and accepted an prolonged remix.
The Contortions broke up in 1979 due to conflicts over cash and personalities. Mr. Chance had additionally developed a heroin dependancy that may have an effect on him for the remainder of his life. Former Contortions members went on to begin bands together with Bush Tetras, the Raybeats and eight Eyed Spy.
Mr. Chance fashioned a brand new lineup of James White and the Blacks, that includes Black sidemen from the trombonist Joseph Bowie’s band Defunkt. It launched the album “Sax Maniac” in 1982; a distinct lineup launched the album “Melt Yourself Down” in 1986.
By the top of the Nineteen Eighties, Mr. Chance had grown disillusioned with the music enterprise, and his dependancy had additionally deepened. But in 2001, he reconciled with surviving Nineteen Seventies Contortions band members and returned to performing with them and different musicians. A French band that had been hurriedly convened for a competition efficiency stayed collectively to carry out and tour with him; they have been billed as James Chance and Les Contortions they usually launched the complete album “Incorrigible!” in 2012.
Ms. Reed stated that Mr. Chance had additionally recorded a trove of solo piano music which will finally be launched.
Mr. Chance gave his final stay performances in 2019. In 2018, youthful admirers of his punk funk introduced him to a nationwide viewers when the Scottish band Franz Ferdinand added him as a shock visitor on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
Mr. Chance performed a jabbing, dissonant, squealing alto sax solo, delivering it with a signature James Brown transfer: a drop to his knees.
In liner notes to a 2010 compilation, “Twist Your Soul,” Mr. Chance wrote, “Our music was rather more than a mere artwork assertion or a automobile to understand mass-produced fantasies of superstar — we lived it. Fame, fortune and the long run have been irrelevant. We might have been self-absorbed, however we have been bent on pushing our music and our lives to the furthest restrict we might conceive of.”
