James Chance, the bandleader and singer-saxophonist of influential punk-funk groups including the Contortions and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, died yesterday in New York after a long period of illness. His brother David Siegfried, organizer of a GoFundMe for the late artist, did not disclose a cause of death, but wrote that the family joined him in his final days to share “memories of his time in music, 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 by developing a style in thrall to 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. Alongside bands like Mars and DNA, they established the no wave movement, an abrasive counterpoint to the CBGB scene at a time when breakout bands like Talking Heads, Television, and Blondie were often away on tour. Chance was involved in the entire first side of the influential, Brian Eno–produced compilation No New York in 1978.
As well as waging sonic warfare with his serrated hooks and saxophone assaults, Chance quickly became infamous for audience confrontation, sometimes involving fist-fights with attendees. “James was like a Jackson Pollock painting, such an explosive personality,” his bandmate Adele Bertei told Simon Reynolds in Rip It Up and Start Again. “And he had a strong masochistic streak.” The bloody spectacle attracted an art crowd, too. “The violence plus the noise element made our shows something like performance art,” Bertei added.
For his part, Chance told The Quietus in 2010 that his aggression was staged in retaliation against the “really artsy SoHo types” at their shows, who “cultivated this attitude of sort of being above it all, and you couldn’t get them to react! People didn’t dance. Clubs like CBGBs and Max’s didn’t even have dance-floors. I just wanted to get a reaction, and actually the first time I did that, the audience were all sitting on the floor. And that really pissed me off. I just started pulling them up off the floor onto their feet and even that didn’t seem to get much of a reaction, so I just started slapping some of them.”
Even before a Kid Creole remix of “Contort Yourself” helped Chance’s music bridge with the disco scene, the Contortions—and, subsequently, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks (with Lydia Lunch) and James Chance and the White and Blacks—wanted to resolve a perceived “separation at that time between different genres,” as Chance told The Quietus. “There were all these scenes right on top of each other. Within two blocks of CBGBs there were like three jazz places I used to go to, but there was hardly any interchange between the two scenes, it was as if the people within them were actively hostile to each other. As far as the punk rock scene, a lot of those people considered their music to be white people’s music, they really didn’t want any black influence in there. I was probably one of the main people to change all that.”
Chance’s output slowed in the 1980s, but a 2001 Contortions reunion prompted sporadic tours (and some financial disputes with ex-bandmates) as the band’s legend and influence grew. Upon the news of his death, artists as disparate as Otomo Yoshihide, Blondie’s Chris Stein, and Kid Congo Powers paid tribute, the last writing that he first saw the Contortions in 1978 at CBGB. “A new world opened up to me that day,” he said. “Earth shattering. Amazing style, both musical and sartorial.”
A virtual memorial will be held in due course, David Siegfried noted in the GoFundMe.
Correction: An earlier version of this article inaccurately stated that James Chance was 70 years old.