Dish It Out: Remembering James Chance

The Contortions, on the No New York compilation.
Chance is pictured top left.

Before John Zorn, before Eric Dolphy, before even Charlie Parker, the alto saxophonist that fascinated me was James Chance. I took up the alto in tenth grade and while I was starting to get into jazz, I hadn't bought much jazz other than Bitches Brew and Albert Ayler's Vibrations (which I bought within about a week of each other). Most of my record purchases were punk rock. James Chance bridged the gap between that style and jazz. In fact, he kind of bridged the gap between Bitches Brew and Vibrations. 

It all comes rushing through the speakers in opening seconds of "Dish It Out," the opening track by the Contortions on the No New York compilation. Jody Harris bangs out a trebly guitar chord, which gets answered by George Scott's rubbery bass. Then Chance starts wailing in the upper register of his horn. Forget melody or harmony. It almost sounds like James chooses certain fingerings on the horn, rather than the pitch it produces. He certainly feels the groove his band is playing, which eventually includes Pat Place's yowling slide guitar and Adele Bertei's organ, which to my ears has always been a beautiful evocation of thunder and lightening. While Chance's horn sounds "wrong" on purpose, Bertei's keys seem to do something more deliberately against the grain.

Chance's vocals on the track might have been inspired by James Brown but his execution seems more like a pissed off dad. It'd be a few years before Ian MacKaye would front Minor Threat and make this level of hostility into a common vocal style. In 1978, no one sounded this rabid. 

Speaking of James Brown, the Contortions final track on No New York was a cover of the Godfather's "I Can't Stand Myself." According to Bertei (I think it's in her memoir but I definitely read it online), the group had never played the song before and ran through it as a soundcheck in the studio. It chugs along on one chord, bolstered by a Harris guitar solo that tries to force a chord change (doesn't happen), climaxing with an abrasive wail from the singer that cues an equally shrill sax solo. 

Could he really play, my innocent mind wondered. The only way to find out was to check out everything. Buy by Contortions. Sax Maniac by his later group, James White and the Blacks. Off-White by the same group. Some of them were pretty good. Some felt a little jokey in a dry sort of way. ("Stained Sheets" in which Lydia Lunch moaned over the phone to an incredulous, hostile James.) But what  was impressive was the way his band, which at times included trombonist Joseph Bowie (brother of Lester, of the Art Ensemble of Chicago), would sound like they were just riffing away but all of a sudden they'd reach a stop-time like clockwork. 

Chance put together a new version of the Contortions in the early '90s, following the re-release of Buy on Henry Rollins' Infinite Zero label. He came to Pittsburgh, playing at Luciano's Coffeehouse, which once existed down the street from Duquesne University. The backing band seemed just a tad slick (the bassist had a six-string bass) but Chance was his usual self, blowing the high F on his horn, shooting down to the low B-flat and then flopping around in the middle. It might have sounded raw or primitive but this was his thing, his sound. Notorious for picking fights with audience members in New York, he claimed at the time he had sworn off that, after one incident damaged his suit. However, a friend who was at that show claimed on Facebook this week that Chance slugged him when he got too close to the stage.

Only today did I discover, through an obit, that the saxophonist studied with the World Saxophone Quartet's David Murray prior to forming the Contortions. Chance spoke to me when I was writing a feature on Joseph Bowie for JazzTimes in 2016, an interview that had been about three decades in the making. Hailing from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he had a love of both the Stooges and jazz of all stripes and had wanted to combine the two.

Upon arriving in New York in 1975, he immersed himself in the loft scene, playing with the Bowie brothers and drummer Charles "Bobo" Shaw. "One thing I liked about those guys is they had an obvious information of rhythm and blues in their playing," he said in our phone conversation. "Even though they were mostly playing free, a lotta times it would go into funk rhythms, even though… at the La MaMa [Theater, in the East Village], they didn’t even have a bass player usually. Or even any rhythm besides drums." He went on to talk about saxophonist Henry Threadgill and trumpeter Ted Daniel playing in James White and the Blacks. 

During the conversation, it started to become clear that Chance's sound on the alto, as raw as it seemed, was a conscious choice to make him distinct in a scene of players. He might not have been playing straight - or even avant garde - jazz, but he knew it was important to have his own sound to set him apart. 

Chance's last performance seems to have been pre-pandemic, according to the obit linked in his Instagram page,  March 2019 in Utrecht. More recently, a gofundme campaign was started to help him deal with medical bills. When he and I talked in 2016, he mentioned that someone in Pittsburgh had expressed interest in bringing him back to town, but unfortunately it didn't happen. Chance (who was born James Siegfried) died on June 18, 2024, though cause of death was not disclosed at the time. 

Thanks, James.