New York sans wave saxophonist James Chance has died

A legend despite his, coincidentally, real name James Alan Siegfried The whole “No Wave” thing never convinced him (“I don’t feel like my music was like other bands,” he answered when they spoke to DNA or MARS), but as a giant of the movement and the godfather of the punk-funk movement he was remembered this Wednesday after his brother announced David Ann Chance, leader of The Contortions and founder of Jim White & The Blacks, has died at the age of 71. According to his family, his health condition has worsened in recent years, and his last performance dates back to 2019, when he finished a short tour in Europe in Utrecht.

Born in Wisconsin in 1953, Siegfried arrived in New York in 1977, changed his name and quickly became a catalyst for the city’s avant-garde. It will take a few years John Zorn It began as Naked City, but there was already a young James absorbing evil nihilism and forming with the still-teenage Lydia Lunch teenage Jesus Jerks, The essential composition in that mixture of primitivism and experimental avant-garde that would be New York Without Wave.

Convinced that jazz had lost much of its craziness and invited by Lunch to leave Teenage Jesus & The Jerks for having too much of an audience connection, Chance founded Contortions And he began to craft a thrilling mythology of a dangerous bullfighter: the combination of ash lyrics, electric spasms and saxophone solos translated night after night also into outbursts of rage on and off the stage: Seldom was that day when by chance, half preacher, half rage – half mad singer , He didn’t end up slapping some onlookers. Something like that, of course, could not last, and after reluctantly allowing himself to be recorded by Eno and debuting in 1979 with “Buy,” Chance buried The Contortions and was reborn as James White & The Blacks to continue serving jazz Shaggy and broken funk.

As New York rock, at the turn of the century, began delving into the box of memories to reclaim the legacy of No Wave, Chance experienced a kind of second youth, re-established The Contortions and hit the road again to pass it on. Rhythm and improvisation sessions. In 2004 he went to Primavera Sound and years later he ended up in Madrid with Les Contorsions, a band made up of French musicians.

Still remembered are the spasms of “Contort Yourself,” the fury with which he attacked releases of “Jailhouse Rock” and “Heat Wave,” and the influence without which bands like LCD audio system Or ecstasy.