Listening to the music of James Chance might have felt like discovering a new octave for the first time—startling rather than conventionally beautiful, but undeniably unique.
Born James Alan Siegfried on April 20, 1953, in Milwaukee, Chance passed away on Tuesday at the age of 71 in New York City. Reports indicate his health had been in decline for several years.
Few Milwaukee natives have left as distinctive a mark on music as Chance did.
According to Jon Pareles, chief pop music critic for The New York Times, Chance, a singer, saxophonist, and composer, “melded punk, funk, and free jazz into bristling dance music.” As the frontman of the Contortions, Chance was a pivotal figure in 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.”
In a 1996 interview, the musician recalled studying jazz at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music in Milwaukee, but finding that jazz didn’t suit him once he moved to New York.
This may have paved the way for his musical innovations.
“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 its own little melody that it plays over and over.”
A memorial will be announced, according to his website.
