One imagines that hearing the music of James Chance might have been like hearing a new octave for the first time. Maybe more startling than beautiful, in Chance’s case, but unique just the same.
Born James Alan Siegfried on April 20, 1953, in Milwaukee, Chance died Tuesday at age 71 in New York City. His health was said to have been declining for several years.
Maybe no Milwaukee native stands out musically the way Chance did.
The singer, saxophonist and composer “melded punk, funk and free jazz into bristling dance music,” according to Jon Pareles, The New York Times’ chief pop music critic. As frontman of the Contortions, Chance was one of the leading musicians of New York’s 1970s no wave scene – a visceral, atonal offshoot of punk rock.
Chance “filled the rhythmic structures of James Brown’s funk with angular, dissonant riffs, to be topped by Mr. Chance’s yelping, blurting, screaming vocals and his trilling, squawking alto saxophone,” Pareles wrote. “He was a live wire onstage, with his own twitchy versions of moves adapted from Brown, Mick Jagger and his punk contemporaries.”
The musician recalled in a 1996 interview how he studied jazz at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music in Milwaukee, but couldn’t make it in jazz once he moved to New York.
Perhaps that opened the door for more innovation in the music world.
“I don’t really use regular chord changes at all,” Chance said in the interview, while petting his cat, Billy Boy Penny Packer. “In my music, each instrument has their own little melody that they play over and over.”
Chance last performed live in 2019, according to the Times.
A memorial is to be announced, according to his website.
