James Chance, the bandleader and singer-saxophonist of influential punk-funk bands including the Contortions and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, died yesterday in New York after a long illness. His brother David Siegfried, organizer of a GoFundMe for the late artist, did not reveal the cause of death, but wrote that the family joined him in his final days to share “memories of his time in music, his childhood and family”. James Chance was 71 years old.
Chance was born James Siegfried in Milwaukee, where he studied piano at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, confounding teachers while developing a style in fascinating fashion with Thelonious Monk and Albert Ayler. He moved to New York in the mid-1970s and, inspired by Alan Vega's Suicide, formed James Chance and the Contortions. Along with bands like Mars and DNA, they established the no wave movement, a fierce counterpoint to the CBGB scene at a time when bands like Talking Heads, Television and Blondie were often absent from touring. Chance featured on the entire first side of the influential Brian Eno-produced compilation Not New York in 1978.
In addition to his sonic warfare with jagged hooks and sax assaults, Chance quickly became notorious for his audience confrontation, sometimes resulting in fistfights with those in attendance. “James was like a Jackson Pollock painting, such an explosive personality,” his partner Adele Berthei told Simon Reynolds. Rip It Up and Start Again. “And he had a strong masochistic streak.” The bloody spectacle also attracted an art crowd. “The violence and the noise element made our shows something like performance art,” added Bertei.
For his part, Chance told Quietus in 2010 that his aggression was orchestrated as retaliation against the “really artsy SoHo guys” at their shows, who “cultivated this attitude like they're on top of everything and you couldn't convince them . react! People weren't dancing. Clubs like CBGB's and Max's didn't even have dance floors. I just wanted to get a reaction, and actually the first time I did it, the audience was all on the floor. And that really pissed me off. I just started lifting them off the floor onto their feet and even that didn't seem to get much of a reaction, so I started slapping some of them.”
Even before a Kid Creole remix of “Contort Yourself” helped Chance's music bridge the disco scene, the Contortions—and then Teenage Jesus and the Jerks (with Lydia Lunch) and James Chance and the White and Blacks—wanted to resolve a perceived “separation at the time between different genres,” as Chance told Quietus. “There were all these scenes right on top of each other. Within two blocks of CBGB there were like three jazz places in which I was going to, but there was almost no exchange between the two scenes, it was like the people in them were actively hostile to each other. As for the punk rock scene, a lot of them thought of their music as white people's music, they didn't really want any black people influence there. I was probably one of the main people who changed all that.”
