Our Infatuation: Remembering James Chance
The celebrated icon of the New York No Wave scene gone at 71
James Chance – aka James White – the Milwaukee born ‘n’ bred punk-jazz saxophonist died yesterday, June 18, at the Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center in New York. He was 71.
His death was announced by his brother David Siegfried of Chicago, who did not specify a cause of death but noted that the musician’s health had been in decline for several years. His final live performance is believed to have taken place in March 2019 in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Chance was musically educated – he studied at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music – and tried to fit in when he moved to New York City in the mid-1970s. Really, he did. He’d been schooled in piano and in saxophone, and went to the big city looking for a jazz gig.
“People in jazz, they didn’t comprehend me,” said Chance, told me back in 1995 before a gig with the Contortions at the Middle East Downstairs club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “I started hanging out at Max’s Kansas City and CBGB.”
Not that Chance was claiming the “misunderstood genius” mantle. He played in the Milwaukee proto-punk band Death back in 1973. He just realized he was an anarchic jazz player/misfit in an accommodating, crossover era, and his taste gravitated towards wthe edginess of punk and funk. He liked Ornette Coleman; he liked James Brown; he liked the edge of hard punk rock. Chance and company gave us squalls, squiggles, sedition, insanity. Dissonance reigned. If fellow saxophonist John Lurie called what he did “fake jazz,” Chance called what he did “improvisation jazz-like.”
Chance – born James Siegfried – became one of the pioneers of the New York no wave movement as well as being part of the free jazz field. He formed Teenage Jesus & the Jerks with roommate Lydia Lunch and then moved on to form the Contortions, where he gained a measure of fame or notoriety (your call) for confrontational gigs that could end in a dust-up between Chance and audience members. I guess Chance’s music had the same provocative element as did fellow New Yorkers Suicide.
Other groups would follow: James White and the Blacks, the Flaming Demonics, James Chance & the Sardonic Symphonics, James Change and Terminal City and James Chance and Les Contortions.
I first heard of Chance and the Contortions, reading about them in the New York Rocker. Wrote Roy Trakin about a May 1978 performance at Artists Space in Lower Manhattan: “Chance immediately established his personal space at the top of his performance by kicking out all those artist types sitting cross-legged within about a six-foot radius of his band, as he snarled and smirked with unmerciful obnoxiousness. The band, meanwhile, lay down a thick mixture of semi-syncopated, twisted swirls of sound, creating a tension of unfinished beats and incomplete rhythms.”
That lured me in. Seriously.
Chance pretty much slipped out of view during the late mid-’80s. He was not, he told me, in jail, contrary to common belief, but he was derailed by music biz ennui and drug abuse. “I was an addict,” he said, “but I wasn’t a Johnny Thunders,” referencing the late guitarist/heroin addict from the New York Dolls.
In 1991, Chance did an interview with Bomb magazine’s Tod Wizon, who noted – not incorrectly – that Chance’s music had what he called an “unbearable edge to it. It takes a few listenings before you hear that the music has the power to transport. But you have to get past the barrier of intensity before you get carried somewhere.”
“To me, it doesn’t matter how harsh or smooth the sound is,” Chance responded. “It’s the emotion that’s in it that counts. Most people today wouldn’t know what a real emotion was if it bit them. So how can they have any emotion in their music? Take jazz for instance, which is the most emotional music there is, or should be. There’s really a big difference if you listen to the old jazz musicians and the young jazz musicians today. The young ones listen to all the right people, … It’s pathetic. They’re so posed. And the reason is they haven’t lived. They’re terrified to experience anything beyond what they’re allowed to experience.
“These are supposed to be artists. And artists are supposed to go deeper, and bring back something. I mean that musicians like Lester Young, Art Pepper, Bud Powell just play their asses off. They lived their asses off, whether they were doing drugs or whatever. People today are so afraid to take any risk in their lives. And the idea the young musicians have is so corny. They want to be like the old jazz musicians in the clubs in the ’40s and ’50s. But they don’t realize that that was a totally fucking wild scene.”
Chance also played on Debbie Harry’s Rockbird album in 1986 and on Blondie’s No Exit. (Chance released an album, Sax Maniac, in 1982 on Blondie guitarist Chris Stein’s short-lived label, Animal.
When we talked, Chance got by during the down years, he said a bit sheepishly, not via a day job, but on “an inheritance.” He played a few straight jazz gigs. He decided to re-form his avant-garde Contortions outfit around 1994 when Henry Rollins picked up Chance’s debut album, Buy, to re-release on his Infinite Zero custom label and committed to two more re-issues. The embers were lit.
Chance and the Contortions — featuring long-termers Jerry Agony on guitar and Luther Thomas on alto sax — didn’t draw that many folks to the Cambridge club on this late summer night. Hey, Chance was a tough sell even when he was young and hip — and he was no doubt a tougher sell now. Some old fans remembered and were curious as to what he was up to, a few younger folks who’d heard the buzz poked their noses in.
No matter how small the crowd, Chance and his band played a tenacious, 45-minute set, as agitated as Nine Inch Nails (in places) and almost as funky as James Brown (in other places). Chance and his four mates often played off Brown-like riffs: sharp, rhythmic jolts that led to wailing sax or guitar excursions, many taking place in the ozone and, yet, making a certain sense.
It was a mesh of the negative and the positive, without any clear-cut line between the two. Order and chaos, reality and parody, white and black — all ground into gnashing mish-mosh. Songs like “Designed to Kill,” “Disposable You,” “Jaded” and “Incorrigible” were whammer-jammered into twisted, funky fun. There was a sense of risk here that few of the newer acts will venture. It was a case of the older guard sticking up for the avant-garde. And a sensual, heady delight.
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very nicely done. i saw james white and the blacks (with polyrock opening) at max’s kansas city in late 79. quite the show, raw and brutal and unique. thanks for writing this.