On the subject of La Nouvelle Vague and the larger notion of Individuality and Originality in art, Jean-Luc Godard once said with characteristic insouciance: “There are no new waves, there is only the ocean.” An insightful and rather daring observation, really, considering it was both backhandedly reverent of a past he so openly criticized and courageously dismissive of the attention and stunning “Newness” ascribed to him and his New Wave colleagues.

Slightly less philosophical, perhaps, were vanguard post-punk composer James Chance’s thoughts on the subject of New Wave music. At the dawn of the 80s, he rather dismissively observed, “New Wave records all sound the same. With most of them, it becomes apparent [the groups] don’t have any talent and should just quit.”

Like Godard, whose films were upfront in their exalted distaste of The Contented Classes, Chance and his “No Wave” peers offered their own refutation of laisser-faire America. More so, perhaps, they reacted to their surroundings, creating a frenetic, combustible sound and vision that is inseparably linked to the streets of New York.

James Siegfried, as he was known before his various incarnations as James Chance & The Contortions, James White & The Blacks, and more recently as James Chance & the Sardonic Symphonics, might have been the most driven and volatile of the lot. Combining his background in Free Jazz with a growing interest in repetitive Funk rhythms, he created a thoroughly funky/unfunky blend of sound, spitting fractured Beefheartian chaos over an ass-tight disco crease. He made an art of making divergent musical phenomena shake hands. White and Black. Funk and Noise. Performance Art and Entertainment. Male and Female.

In performance, he prowled the stage like a howling wolf about to lose grip. He wore a monstrous sandy-blond pompadour and mastered the Jerry Lee Lewis-like one-foot squiggle. Simultaneously, he freaked a white noise funk, half-James Brown, half-Ornette Coleman. It was all about overload and jolted expression.

Disco merging with jazz and the freedom after punk. Like fellow NY composer Rhys Chatham, Chance also wasn’t averse to upping the ante, occasionally taking to physically confronting what he saw as “blasé, arty Soho types,” literally dragging people to their feet and assaulting them in an attempt to get them to break down the boundary between “Entertainer” and “The Entertained.” Though his influence on the theatrical, noisy and confrontational histrionics of Black Dice, Liars and other neo-No Wavers has been voiced somewhat obviously, lesser stated is the fact that Chance’s envelope-pushing wasn’t far from the conceptual rigor of David Bowie’s Pop Performance Art. And that his slippery persona-shifting can also be seen as a predecessor to the likes of the more accessible and mutable Beck.

This winter, Tiger Style will release a collection documenting Chance’s foremost recordings and ultra-rare one-offs. He continues to play in New York, and hopes to release his new group’s album later this year, with a European tour to follow.

A CONVERSATION WITH JAMES CHANCE

The Blow Up: Hi James. It’s Alexis.
James Chance: Hi. So, I just heard about Phil Spector.

The Blow Up: What happened? Did he die?
James Chance: No. He just got arrested for murder.

The Blow Up: Who did he murder?
James Chance: A woman. They haven’t announced it yet. She was killed in his house in LA.

The Blow Up: Wow. That’s crazy.
James Chance: Yeah.

The Blow Up: So you’re a fan, I take it.
James Chance: Well, yeah. Not a big fan. But you know, how could you not be a fan of Phil Spector?

The Blow Up: Right. So, I read your first musical lessons came from Nuns. Is that right?
James Chance: Yeah, that’s true (laughs). I was like seven years old and, you know, I went to Catholic school and was an alter boy besides. They had these nuns giving piano lessons and it was very. . . It almost ruined music for me. Because it was just so totally dry. Oriented to just reading music and not really learning how music is actually put together. Just reading the notes.

The Blow Up: Had you been attracted to music when you were young?
James Chance: Well, to tell you the truth, it was more like my parents’ idea. I just went along with it at the beginning. Then later, when I was around 12 or 13, I started taking lessons with this older guy at a music store and he taught me a little about jazz and had me playing old standards. And right about that time, I started listening to--this is right about ’65 or so--that’s when I really starting getting into stuff like The Stones and The Yardbirds and Question Mark & The Mysterions.

The Blow Up: What took you to the Alto?
James Chance: Well, I discovered jazz a little later. I first started at the piano. I had a style that was like a combination of [Thelonious] Monk and Cecil Taylor. And I was going to this music conservatory in Milwaukee--where I’m from--and no one could play with me on piano. One reason I switched to sax is because I wasn’t really interested in playing typical, straight-ahead jazz comping and all that. So I figured if I could play sax, I wouldn’t have to worry about being part of the rhythm section.

The Blow Up: Then you moved to New York?
James Chance: Yeah. I went to the conservatory for about three or four years. I had a little jazz group. It was kind of like the first avant-garde jazz group in Milwaukee. The James Siegfried Quintet. Brian Lynch--he played with Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Eddy Palmieri--he was in the group.

The Blow Up: So what made you move to New York? Was it to be a jazz player?
James Chance: Yeah. It was a combination of that and also it was to check out what was happening at CBGB’s. I just saw these little ads in The Village Voice, you know. And it was like a little picture of The Ramones or The Heartbreakers and it said “C.B.G.B.” and I didn’t even know what it was about. But it looked interesting. See, in Milwaukee, I’d also been in a rock band called Death. It was kind of a Stooges, Velvet Underground-influenced group. And the lead singer actually killed himself--he was one of my best friends--after the band broke up. People in Milwaukee in 1973 just didn’t get it at all. That was one of the reasons I came to New York around that time.

The Blow Up: Before The Contortions, you took part in the Free Jazz Loft scene. What was that like?
James Chance: I did a little bit, yeah. I played some sessions. Played places like the Tin Palace. And I did have a small trio or quartet that played in a few of those lofts. But, uh, I didn’t really see it going anywhere. I could just tell the jazz scene was not going to accept me.

The Blow Up: Did you meet John Lurie at that time?
James Chance: I didn’t meet John until about ’78. He used to follow me down the street. I actually made one of those super-8 movies with him.

The Blow Up: Yeah, how did that happen?
James Chance: Well, what I remember is he came and knocked on my door--I hardly knew him--and gave me some speed. And he took me over to his apartment and he wanted to make this movie. I seem to remember part of it was a parody of a talk show where I was like a rockstar. And in another part of it, I was like The Creature from The Black Lagoon or something [laughs]. It was pretty strange. I’ve never actually seen it.

The Blow Up: Was your first experience outside of the free jazz scene with TEENAGE JESUS AND THE JERKS?
James Chance: Yeah. Except for one time when I was playing sax in the park. Syl Sylvain came walking down the street and he dragged me into a little session with him. I’d almost forgotten about that. Another time, when I was playing in the park – you know that drummer Charles ‘Bobo’ Shaw? I was a fan of that St. Louis stuff and was actually playing a song from one of his albums, and he came walking down the street and he heard me playing it and I got to be friends with him and some of those other guys like Luther Thomas. Of the established musicians, they were some of the few that accepted me.

The Blow Up: What was your time like with Teenage Jesus?
James Chance: Well, Lydia (Lunch) was actually living with me. And I was kind of the one who encouraged her to do music after she played these little songs for me, which were most of the Teenage Jesus songs. I think most people would’ve just told her to stop (laughs).
She’d been writing. The first time I met her, she showed me a long sort of prose poem she wrote. She was very young. She was only about, oh, maybe 16 when she first came to New York. At the very beginning, we were doing a couple of my songs and Jody Harris [future member of The Contortions] was in it. It was me, Lydia, Jody and the Japanese bass player, Wreck. We were doing half my songs, half Lydia’s. And she was singing some of my songs. We never really found a drummer and it didn’t really work out. It just didn’t gel.

The Blow Up: So, did you decide to split apart from that?
James Chance: No, she more or less kicked me out, and that’s when I started The Contortions. Her concept just became more minimal as it went along. To the point where she just didn’t want the saxophone in there.

The Blow Up: On the subject of “New Wave,” you told Kurt Loder in 1980, “You can only listen to people who don’t know how to play for so long. With most of them, it becomes apparent that they don’t have any talent and should just quit.” But it seemed like DNA and Lydia and your other, more artistic peers reveled in an intentional naïve musicianship.
James Chance: Yeah. There are people who don’t know how to play that learned how. And then there are people who just should’ve never started. I feel the music scene now is even more that way. There are just a million bands out there. And most of them are doing it so they can have some fantasy of being a rockstar for like half an hour and they’re willing to play for nothing in order to do it. It makes it really difficult for people who are trying to be professional musicians.

The Blow Up: That’s interesting that you say “professional musicians” because it’s obvious that you’re steeped in jazz and you’ve been playing for a long time, while people like Arto Lindsay or Ikue Mori, at first, probably didn’t like the idea of being a “Professional Musician.”
James Chance: Well, I didn’t either. It’s true that I’ve studied music and everything but I think I have a certain foot in that camp, too. I mean, I’ve never been really polished technically. You know, I can play all different kinds of material but it always comes out my way. I can’t just sit down and play a million different styles and sound like someone else, you know. And at the time, it was liberating to play with some of these people who were totally unschooled because they were free of a lot of the preconceptions and prejudices that many trained musicians have.

The Blow Up: How do you feel about the terms used to describe your music. I’m thinking of “no wave,” “punk funk,” “post-punk.” Do you prefer one to another?
James Chance: Well, I think my music is kind of unique and I never really thought of it as fitting into any category. No Wave was just something that was made up to correspond to No New York [The seminal “No Wave” compilation recorded and produced by Brian Eno which featured James Chance & The Contortions, Mars, DNA and Teenage Jesus & The Jerks].

The Blow Up: What do you think of all the renewed interest in late 70’s New York?
James Chance: Well, for the people who were around then, or to me, I mean, it was so much better then. I’m probably just fondly remembering it. For the younger people who weren’t around then, I think it’s just like there’s nothing like that now. New York has become such a tamer place. You know, the city had a real wildness then, which has sort of been amputated. But it was never as dangerous as people made it out to be.

I remember when I first came out, people in Milwaukee told me to get a gun! “You better take a gun if you’re going to go in the subway!” and all this stuff [laughs]. Although I did get robbed a few times over the years, actually I think LA is a more dangerous place than New York. I had the clothes stolen off my back in LA.

The Blow Up: Early on, during The Contortions period, The New York Times—-John Rockwell if I recall correctly--attacked your stage persona, saying you “espoused over hostility” and your “posturings were so extreme and limiting that it’s hard to imagine The Contortions will be able to evolve from here.”
James Chance: I think he was wrong about that. You know, maybe some of the stuff I said on stage at the beginning was a bit childish. But it was just fun. It was just fun to get up there. You know, hate is a really good motivator. There was a lot of hate and contempt for the world and there was a lot of emotion that motivated my early stuff. It’s still there but you just can’t keep it at that kind of a pitch. It just gets to be too much of a drain on your energy.

The Blow Up: What inspired you to make confrontation part of the live experience?
James Chance: One thing was just that after being through the whole jazz scene and everything, the whole passivity of audiences used to really bother me. I wanted it to be beyond just a bunch of people standing around on a stage. As far as the form it took in terms of actually attacking people, it was spontaneous at the beginning. You know, the people at the early Contortions gigs were these Art-types in Soho and Tribeca and their attitude just really bugged me because they acted so superior. The first time I did it, it was at some benefit for some magazine or something. And the people were all sitting on the floor and that really infuriated me. And I just decided I was going to make them stand up and at least get on their feet. So I just sort of started dragging them on to their feet. So I guess some of them resisted, and that’s how it got started.

The Blow Up: Did the danger excite you or freak you out?
James Chance: Yeah, I would say it excited me. The band didn’t like it. I remember one time Adele saying, “You’re pimping the band! You’re pimping the band!” I don’t know exactly what she meant by that. But, yeah, it added this whole element of real danger that certainly brought things up to a whole other level. But after I started getting a lot of publicity, when it started to be a thing where people were coming just to see that, where it was expected and part of the act, then the reason for doing it disappeared. Because the whole point was to do something that was totally unexpected. So then it got to the point where it was more unexpected not to do it.

The Blow Up: Did your provocations ever extend beyond the stage? On the street?
James Chance: Yeah. I got into some fights around that time. There are some pictures of me with black eyes. That wasn’t make-up. That’s another reason why I kind of cooled out on that stuff: it just started to get out of control where it was spilling over into my actual life.

The Blow Up: Well, I’m curious about your views on violence. Because on the one hand, it seems like being angry at the world, in a sense, it seems that part of that anger might come from the fact that the world is full of violence. And so, to react to that with more violence is kind of an interesting thing.
James Chance: That wasn’t the reason for the anger. The anger was against what I saw as stupidity and tastelessness. Not against violence per se. I mean, I just find violence a very interesting thing. It’s the extremes of experience that are interesting and violence is a very human thing. And I don’t think we’ll ever be without it. People seek it out.
Look at what’s happening now. I mean, with Bush and them, their so determined to have their war. To me, it’s almost an irrational thing. It’s engrained in people, biologically. Especially males.

The Blow Up: When you changed your name to James White & the Blacks, you were obviously commenting on race.
James Chance: Yeah. But it was just a playful thing. It wasn’t supposed be a really heavy thing. I was kind of having fun with something that people are touchy to have fun with. The way that came about was that when I signed to Ze Records, Michael Zilca, the president, besides signing the Contortions, he said he wanted me to make a disco album. And that’s all he said. He said, “Here’s a budget. Just make me a disco album.” And he didn’t define it any more than that or come to the sessions or anything. Just, my take on disco. And it was actually Anya Phillips who came up with the name James White & The Blacks.

The Blow Up: What were your views on Disco?
James Chance: I like the idea of Disco. I thought it had possibilities. But I didn’t like much of the actual music. I liked the idea of just this hypnotic beat and also of creating some kind of total environment. On a lot of disco records, there might be like one noise in there that I like and the whole rest of it I hated.

The Blow Up: In many ways, your music is about juxtaposition and contradiction. Was your approach influenced in any way by visual artists?
James Chance: Well, I’ll answer the last part first. No, I don’t think it has been. I’m a lot more into literature and film. There are painters I like, but it’s not something I’m that involved with. Especially at the time of The Contortions, there wasn’t really much of anything going on in painting, you know. I remember when I first came to New York, the big thing in Soho was like Photo Realism or something. It was all pretty tame. It wasn’t really until the beginning of the ‘80’s that anything interesting started happening. And I think that was more influenced by people in my scene than the other way around.

On contradiction and juxtaposition, most of the things I like have some kind of contradictory aspect to them. For instance, Lester Young, one of my favorite sax players. There are a lot of contradictions between a kind of melodic beauty and swing. It’s hard to put into words. But I think most of the things I like express some sort of contradiction, because if you don’t have that, then it’s just kind of bland.

The Blow Up: What film or novels had an affect on you?
James Chance: Well, the stuff I’m doing now is very influenced by Film Noir. The new album actually has a few songs named after movies. Like, “The Setup,” “The Street with no Name.” The album’s called Down and Dirty. The band name was James White and the Sardonic Symphonics, but I changed it because people just couldn’t pronounce it. Now it’s called Terminal City. But the song “Down and Dirty” was kind of inspired by a scene in The Man With The Golden Arm where Frank Sinatra deals the cards and says, “Here they come now, down and dirty.”

The Blow Up: Regarding The Revue approach you developed with James White & The Blacks, what was your attraction to it? A lot of people have claimed you must have a big James Brown influence. So when you did the Tuxedo and Pompadour thing, was it to emulate James Brown or was it an attraction to the revue?
James Chance: First, yes I’m very influenced by James Brown. With James White & The Blacks, it started out as just an album. It was just kind of a goof. Anya had a lot to do with the revue and the image. She more or less came up with the look that I more or less have stuck with since then. As soon as she did it, I realized that was always how I’d wanted to look but I was never able to conceive of it myself. I really like the whole idea of old-fashioned showbiz. Of being an entertainer as opposed to an artist. Not just a guy who walks on stage. Since I really didn’t want to do the violence thing anymore--even now I still jump out in the audience but--it was kind of a replacement, a different kind of theatrical element to replace that. I still have the pompadour now. Sometimes I let it fall over my face like a Peek-a-Boo. Like a male Veronica Lake or something (laughs).

The Blow Up: Do you listen to music coming out today?
James Chance: No, I don’t listen to hardly any new music. I listen to mostly stuff before, say, 1975. Everyone’s been telling me that there are bands that say they’re influenced by what I did, and I’m sure eventually I’ll hear them. But I don’t see any reason to seek them out. For a long time, I felt that I really wanted to go back to the source. That’s what I want my music to come from. And not something that some contemporary of mine is doing.

I’ve become a real kind of--I hate to use the word Conservative--but I’m really into the whole tradition of Black American. Not just Black American because now people almost give too much credit to Black people. There were white people in it from the beginning. White people wrote almost all the songs, you know, the standards. So, it’s all mixed up from the beginning. Most young people have no idea of the tradition of music. Even going back to the 60’s, the rock music of that era is of such a higher quality than the stuff that’s around now. So, every once in a while I hear something that I like. There’s one band that I’m friends with that I like. They’re called Speedball Baby. I played on their new album. But I just don’t have the interest to trawl through it to find something I like.

The Blow Up: What if a band asked you to play sax on their album?
James Chance: Well, sure, if they’re going to pay me, I’ll probably do it unless I think it’s just totally horrendous.

The Blow Up: There’s a tendency to sort of group the scene in late 70’s New York as a cohesive scene. Do you see any of those people around?
James Chance: Yeah. I did a reunion of the Contortions last year. I don’t really hang out with too many of them. I’m a real recluse actually. I stay home with my girlfriend who I’ve been with for like 15 years. Every once in a while, I do speak with someone. I just saw Ivan Julian the other day. In fact, I’m doing something with him in Chicago. But there are a lot of people that are dead. There are a lot of people that moved out of New York. There are a lot of people who, even if they are in New York, they’re out of the music business. I feel like I’m really actually one of the few survivors of that time that’s still around making music.

FIN