James Chance
No Wave's pugnacious sax maniac passes away at age 71
There's a story in photographer Julia Gorton's excellent book Nowhere New York: Dark, Insulting, and Unmelodic about James Chance and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The club Squat was holding its 'James Chance Dance Contest' with James himself on hand as a judge, along with Debbie Harry and Richard Hell. The prize was a set of all of Chance's records.
The DJ began to play music and the crowd of dancers began to do their thing. Basquiat was there, dressed in a jump suit, but dancing completely barefoot. Apparently he danced like a wild man, because after a brief consultation, the judges announced that Basquiat was the winner of the contest. To a lot of cheering and applause, James Chance presented the artist with his prize, a small stack of the saxophonist's records. As Nic Dembling (Comateens) tells the story:
"To everyone's complete astonishment, Basquiat took the records and with one rapid motion whacked the pile down on his knee and snapped them all completely in half, and then threw the pieces out into the crowd. Then he jumped off the stage and walked out of the theater.
James looked completely shocked. And as Jean-Michel disappeared out the door and the crowd absolutely roared with laughter, James yelled into the mike, "SOME PEOPLE HAVE NO CLASS!!"
Chance, the leader of The Contortions and James White and The Blacks as well of a host of other groups in which he participated with a shifting array of musicians, passed away this week at the age of 71. It is safe to say that most people have never heard of him and that he possessed what would generally be called a cult following even though he, along with the equally obscure Lydia Lunch, was arguably the most durable act to emerge from the late seventies sub genre dubbed No Wave.
Chance, who was born James Siegfried, came from Milwaukee to New York City having studied avant garde jazz. For a time he participated in the city's vibrant loft jazz movement, until he realized that he was much more simpatico with a new rock scene that was also developing downtown. Before long he was working with Lunch in a nascent version of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks (pre-Jesus, if you will) until she decided against having a sax in the band. Chance regrouped with another set of musicians and formed the Contortions.
The Contortions played a disjointed, fractured kind of dance music punctuated by weird guitar bursts and Chance's squalling, atonal alto sax. To this he added lyrics that espoused "a lot of hate and contempt for the world" and a stage persona that was confrontational in attitude and stance, as well as physically. With song titles like "Designed to Kill," "I Don't Want to Be Happy," and "Throw Me Away," one might imagine that the group was basically another punk outfit, but part of what differentiated the No Wave kids was they rejected both punk and new wave, seeking to forge a new sound that wasn't basically a retro rehash with modern production or 'revolutionary' music that was based completely on historical rock and roll.
James adapted a stage persona somewhere between James Brown, a game show host, and an enraged drunk at a local bar. Early on, he developed a reputation for getting in audience's faces and mixing it up:
One thing was just that after being through the whole jazz scene and everything, the whole passivity of audiences used to really bother me. I wanted it to be beyond just a bunch of people standing around on a stage. As far as the form it took in terms of actually attacking people, it was spontaneous at the beginning. You know, the people at the early Contortions gigs were these Art-types in Soho and Tribeca and their attitude just really bugged me because they acted so superior.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080106164745/http://theblowup.com/06/Projects/james_chance/
As word spread, audiences began to come to Contortions shows for the confrontation, and James backed off on his punk presentation. His visual style and overall presentation was largely the creation of his girlfriend and manager at the time, Anya Phillips. Anya was a key player in developing the scene's fashion and overall aesthetic, its playful mythology constructed from elements of disco, high fashion, b movies, comic books, punk, and plain old trash. It is her cutup swimsuit that is featured the cover of the Contortions' only album, Buy. Chance's trademark pompadour and white suit jacket made him instantly stand out from more pedestrian No Wave bands like Mars and DNA.
ZE Records founder Michael Zilkha wanted Chance to record a disco album. While that sounds like a straightforward request, Zilkha gave no further instructions to the bands on his roster, with wildly different results. He told Ric Ocasek he wanted Suicide's second album to be like Giorgio Moroder's work on "I Feel Love" and he ended up with a danceable but dangerous sound. What he got from Chance was something completely different.
Again influenced by Phillips, James changed his band name to James White and the Blacks and created a record that was somewhat like an old R&B revue with special guests (Lydia Lunch, billed as 'Stella Rico') and songs that played with the idea of a white musician playing fundamentally black-influenced music. As he later put it, the whole thing was designed to be a bit of a goof, with nothing too serious behind it. The music is pretty similar to Buy, but with more accent on the beat. The album, titled Off White, also featured an August Darnell remix of "Contort Yourself," a track from Buy that also figured prominently in live shows, which became a club favorite.
Following Anya's untimely death, James recorded Sax Maniac with a new lineup of the Blacks culled from trombonist Joseph Bowie's band Defunkt. The record, which he dedicated to Anya, doesn't really break new musical ground, but it benefits from a professional lineup that plays Chance's style with conviction and from a backing horn section, with arrangements written by Chance. That record was released on Chris Stein's Animal Records imprint, and Chance also played on Debbie Harry's 1986 record Rockbird, adding a solo to the end (entering at 3:35) of the leadoff track, "I Want You."
ZE Records released another record in 1983, this time under the moniker James White's Flaming Demonics. This group featured two guitarists, bass, drums, tenor and baritone sax, trumpet, and backup vocalists. Chance (White) also plays some Farfisa organ and piano on the record, which is really quite good, very in line with what the Contortions were originally doing, but with a perspective that comes more from the free blowing side of things than the punk side.
Chance spent the nineties in semi-retirement, nursing a heroin habit and less than thrilled with his experiences in the music industry. In 1999 he played on Blondie's No Exit record, and began to appear now and again. In 2001 he reunited with original Contortions members Pat Place, Jody Harris, and John Chritensen for a limited number of live shows. He made guests appearances and played live in France with a group of French musicians under the flag James Chance and Les Contortions.
In 2016 Chance mounted what was, for him, a comeback, releasing the record The Flesh Is Weak under the Contortions moniker. Though no previous members of the band played on the record, it signaled a fresh start, or maybe a legacy booster. While many of the tracks are covers and reworking of previously recorded songs, they get a solid reading here, and it's nice to have them on one album. James appeared on one of the late night shows, sitting in with the band and promoting his record, and I remember thinking that he didn't look so great. That's confirmed by this post from photographer Rick McGinnis, talking about a brief photo shoot he did with Chance in December of 2016:
"James Chance was clearly not well when I photographed him. He was in town touring to promote a new record, and I had brought along my portable studio hoping to get him to sit for a portrait...The shoot was brief but James was gracious. He was clearly in some considerable pain – too much to disguise in my photos. He had lived with loss for as long as I knew about him; his first partner Anya Phillips died of cancer in 1981, and his partner at the time I took these photos, Judy Taylor, would die in 2020, a year after Chance’s last live performance."
No Wave and New York in 1977 were terminal situations--neither one was supposed to make it into the eighties alive. The city managed to find its way, but there were casualties--poverty, gentrification, heroin, and violence managed to push out the artistic crowd that had made Manhattan its bombed out playground. Chance's performance was never meant to have a second act but he and Lydia Lunch (in particular) continued to work from the playbook that they themselves wrote decades ago without becoming stagnant or giving in to more mainstream concerns.
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