James Chance and Die Contortions, Unstoppable Sweeties Show

A key figure in No Wave, Chance has been playing a combination of
improvisational jazz-like music and punk in the New York music scene
since the late 1970s, in such bands as Teenage Jesus and the Jerks,
James Chance and the Contortions, James White and the Blacks, The
Flaming Demonics, James Chance & the Sardonic Symphonics, James
Chance and Terminal City, and James Chance and Les Contortions. His
music can be described as combining the freeform playing of Ornette
Coleman with the solid funk rhythm of James Brown, though filtered
through a punk rock lens.

It would have been easy to be fooled by
James Chance in late ’70s New York, just looking at him. His greased
pompadour, ski-jump nose, plus the lounge lizard attire he favored, gave
him more than a passing resemblance to the movie brats of decades
previous. But if you happened to see him onstage blowing his horn or
getting in a fistfight with a fan in a club, you saw him for who he
really was : one of the preeminent avant-garde provocateurs of his age.

Chance
arrived in New York from his native Milwaukee in the mid ’70s, hauling
his saxophone and his given surname, Sigfried. He soon hooked up with
Lydia Lunch and her crew of downtown adolescent artists/mischief-makers,
playing briefly in the seminal Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, but he left
in 1977 to form his own band, The Contortions, who fused jazz
improvisation and funk rhythms, with live shows often ending in violence
when Chance would confront audience members. Maybe more than anyone
else in the so-called No Wave set, Chance was fascinated with black
music of the era, and with The Contortions, sought to integrate the
horn-spiked stop-on-a-dime rhythms of funk and the heady freedom of
Ornette Coleman’s sax playing with the confrontational and political
theatricality of punk. The Contortions reached a wider audience with
their contribution to the Brian Eno-compiled No New York collection of
No Wave acts.

A tight rhythm section provided the band’s funky
skeleton, while open-tuned slide guitar, lurching organ, squawking sax,
and all manner of groans and yells gave The Contortions their wild
dissonance. Even today, with numerous bands in the post-punk renaissance
acknowledging their indebtedness to No Wave in general and Chance in
particular, The Contortions’ blend of organized twitchiness and raw
anarchy sounds remarkably unique. But like the scene to which they were
so central, The Contortions burned out quickly, releasing only one
album, Buy the Contortions, along with the four songs they contributed
to Brian Eno’s legendary No New York comp. Chance soon resurfaced as
James White (in honor of James Brown) with a new band called The Whites
which actually featured almost the same personnel as The Contortions
(and Lydia Lunch under the pseudonym Stella Rico). Part parody, part
homage, part smirking catastrophe in action, James White and the Blacks
moved away from the punk that had defined their earlier incarnation, and
towards a fusion of the soul, funk, and free jazz with disco that ranks
as one of the weirdest musical hybrids of its era. But like all of
Chance’s endeavors, The Blacks’ one album, Off White, called into
question in all sorts of interesting ways the meaning of “black” music
and “white” music and the ways racial identity is inscribed in artistic
creations of any sort. Yet another jazz-funk hybrid band known as The
Flaming Demonics followed. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, numerous
labels, most notably the great reissue label ROIR, released various
Chance artifacts. But the coup de grace came in 2003, when Tiger Style
Records put out the definitive Chance retrospective, Irresistible
Impulse. The triple-disc, 49-song box set features the albums Chance cut
with each of his three bands, plus a fourth Chance album from 1982,
rarities, lost sessions, and assorted other Chance miscellanea.In 2001,
Chance reunited with original Contortions members Jody Harris (guitar),
Pat Place (slide guitar) and Don Christensen (drums) for a few limited
engagements. The reunited group has played twice at the All Tomorrow’s
Partiesmusic festival, and, in 2008, at the PS1 Warm Up series.In Europe
he performs with James Chance & Les Contortions, French musicians
who have been his backing band since 2006.