Introduction

His music is exciting, different and new, yet I’m not sure I like it. (1983 review of James Chance)[i]

This is the final post in my series about the provocative no wave sax player, James Chance. [ii] In Parts 1-3, I examined how a handful of critics supported Chance’s music, sometimes struggling with conflicted feelings. At the end of my last post, Chance had founded two bands and released several recordings that defined no wave. As a result, a handful of open-minded critics recognized the importance of Chance’s music.  

However, James Chance’s press supporters found themselves in a place occupied by generations of open-minded music journalists before his time. They supported a controversial artist who introduced music that was artistically innovative but commercially unproven. And so, by understanding how these critics covered Chance, we learn how music journalists help innovate popular music.     

This post focuses on critics’ reaction to Chance’s music from 1980 to 1983. During this time, a new round of critics solidified James Chance’s place in the history of American popular music.   

James Chance: I Want Something More

Take the case of Chance’s Live in New York, released in 1981. It was a mail-order cassette of performances at New York’s Peppermint Lounge. Cassettes, easier to produce than LPs, were a preferred medium for 1980s alternative artists and fans.

Although the recording was obscure, at least one newspaper critic reviewed it, Martha Hume, a New York Daily News pop music critic:[iii]

The Chance sets .. sound like a mediocre bootleg, complete with audience noise as well as unintentional feedback. Nonetheless, Chance’s saxophone and the conviction of his voice make the tape compelling. Under the guise of mixing jazz, funk and rap, Chance actually is a very earnest young man. His voice … may sound cynical, but it really isn’t. “Sophisticated Cancer,” and a cover of James Brown’s “King Heroin” are wonderful. There’s passion here.[iv]

Therefore, Hume championed sincerity in pop music, a quality too often ignored by male critics. Accordingly, she saw through Chance’s cynical façade and recognized his hunger to play music.

A year later, Chance expressed this yearning in an interview:

At first, I was into shock value – jarring sounds, because the musicians who were becoming popular seemed to derive too much pleasure from it. I was repulsed by the whole scene, the values, because it had no emotional power to it.

That whole no-wave scene that was an attack on the new wave movement was – and still is – shallow. I want something more.[v]

In fact, that “something more” was a bigger dose of free jazz.

Sax Maniac

This new album by singer and alto saxophonist James White … is one of the most spectacular rock entries of the year. His sax solos, which are filled with humorous, frenzied, rapid, and jarring runs resembling the sound of an automobile horn, defy all music tradition but are nonetheless refreshing madness … [vi]

This was how the Daily News‘ Hugh Wyatt described Sax Maniac by James White and the Blacks. Released in 1982, the album came a year after Chance’s girlfriend, Anya Phillips, died of cancer. Afterward, Chance created a new lineup and dedicated the disc to Phillips. 

Moreover, the recording included notable guest artists, including Black trombonist Joseph Bowie. Bowie launched the jazz-punk group Defunkt in 1978 while singing with the Contortions. Following that, the groundbreaking band energized the New York no wave scene. Furthermore, Bowie asserted the right of Black musicians to participate in a style of music rooted in Black jazz.

Robert Palmer on James Chance

Indeed, Bowie’s playing electrified Sax Maniac, which received a glowing review by the New York Times’ first designated rock critic, Robert Palmer. Like Wyatt, Palmer was among the new round of critics open to Chance’s latest work:  

The basic ingredients in his music haven’t changed. He still sings like a nervous, neurasthenic James Brown, plays manic squeals, honks and moans on his alto saxophone, and shamelessly parodies both James Brown’s show business routines and his own reputation. ”Hey fellas, get back, ’cause he’s going to attack,” his backup singers chirp, and he prefaces a crazed saxophone solo by bragging, ”Now listen to how it’s played by Mr. White.”

But while the music on Sax Maniac is as deliberately tacky and mordantly funny as ever, it also evidences considerable growth. Mr. White’s horn arrangements are much more sophisticated and inventive, especially on his demolition derby deconstruction of Arlen and Mercer’s ”That Old Black Magic” and the woefully perverse ”Disco Jaded,” which sounds like party music for the aftermath of the next world war. His keyboard work is much improved, too, and it is now as important an instrumental voice as his saxophone. Mr. White’s music still may not be to every taste, but ”Sax Maniac” is a delightful and impressive album, his strongest to date.[vii]

punk-funk will no longer do

Furthermore, wrote Palmer,

… this new fusion music, whatever one chooses to call it (punk-funk will no longer do), is the most vital fringe area of contemporary popular music. And with musicians as inventive and ambitious as these working to expand the music and its audience, it may not remain a fringe area for very much longer.[viii]

However, James Chance went through one more metamorphosis during this formative period of his career. Once again, some critics had contradictory responses to the bandleader’s artful noise.  

James White and the Flaming Demonics

Following this, James White and the Blacks released one more album, the limited release Melt Yourself Down. Surprisingly, it received little if any press attention.

Consequently, Chance moved to Paris but returned to New York City in 1983. Then, he formed a new band, James White’s Flaming Demonics, and released a self-titled album.  

One reviewer expressed the continuing ambiguity felt by some critics about Chance’s music:

James White has a strange appeal.

His music is exciting, different, and new, yet I’m not sure I like it …  [ix]

It is discordant, dangerous, disturbing, and potentially the hottest dance sound ever …

It is a melting pot of sound – but it is hard to listen to for long.

The music is harsh, even unpleasant at times, but there’s so much going on that it is difficult to tear yourself away …[x]

And so, Chance continued to seduce critics with music that broke the rules of listenability.

Yelping, blurting, screaming

Chance continued to perform innovative music for the remainder of this career, up until his recent death. During that time he came in and out of the press spotlight as a founder of the 1980s New York rock avant garde. In his remembrance of Chance, New York Times pop critic Jon Pareles wrote:

During the late 1970s explosion of punk culture in New York City, the Contortions were at the forefront of a style called no wave — music that set out to be as confrontational and radical in sound and performance as punk’s fashion and attitude were visually.

Contortions songs … 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. He was a live wire onstage, with his own twitchy versions of moves adapted from Brown, Mick Jagger and his punk contemporaries. [xi]

44 years earlier, another notable pop critic wrote a definitive real-time summation of Chance’s wildly innovative music.

Lester Bangs on James Chance  

Just what is all this stuff?[xii]

Unquestionably, one of the most trenchant analyses of Chance’s music was Lester Bangs’ article “Free Jazz/Punk Rock” in the April-May 1980 issue of Musician.[xiii] The publication, founded in 1976, became known for its high-quality writing on American popular music by critics such as Bangs and pre-Hollywood Cameron Crowe.

The “stuff” Bangs referred to? New York City no wave with its blending of jazz and punk:

… the end of the Seventies, with its apparent exhaustion of forms and general disgust with what has come to be known as “fusion music,” has brought us what seems at first glance to be the unlikeliest fusion of all: punk rock and free jazz. But it’s been a long time a-borning, and it has antecedents. If you want to know how we got to such a strange common ground, or perhaps if you just want to be pissed off, read on.[xiv]

Bangs then traced the history of punk jazz back to the Stooges – “every bit as good as Archie Shepp” – and other rock musicians influenced by free jazz, such as Captain Beefheart and Tom Verlaine. He gave props to the new generation, especially,

Pere Ubu who combine Ornette/Ayler sax flurries, synthesizer murk, guitar distortion, and a deep industrial rhythmic force somewhere between clank and drone … Pere Ubu’s music has a rhythmic quality that doesn’t flow in the sense to which most rock and all blues-derived musics have accustomed us.[xv]

Bangs challenged his readers to listen to music different from what they were familiar with. But he had more to say.

An Edge and Fury

And then, after laying out the punk-jazz family tree, Bangs focused on James Chance and his music:

 In the past couple of years, there have been almost too many experimental bands in New York to keep track of. The one that’s gotten the most publicity is the Contortions, led by Ayler/James Brown devotee James Chance, who plays what is, according to your taste, either the most godawful or most interesting new sax around. Certainly, at its best, his playing, primitive as it is, has an edge and fury that’s missing from the recent work of most of the holdover “free” players from the Sixties.

But Bangs questioned Chance’s work as James White:

Unfortunately, recently, he’s cut back on his sax work to concentrate on perfecting his James Brown imitation, which isn’t too convincing. He’s released two albums, Buy Contortions and Off-White, under the name James White and the Blacks, the former more interesting than the latter, but the best work by the original Contortions (who were canned last year, owing to certain unfortunate aspects of Chance’s temperament) is still on Brian Eno’s 1978 anthology of Lower Manhattan “no-wave” bands, No New York.

Lester Bowie

However, Bangs flipped over an addition to Chance’s ensemble:

And come to think of it, his sax work has a precursor in James Brown, too: that guy who stood up in the middle of the title cut on Brown’s Super Bad album and took that horrible raggedy solo, which probably got him fired.

The last time I saw Chance, he seemed to have paled (no pun intended) considerably, though his new band had a trombone player who was an absolute motherfucker. Later, I found out that this was Joseph Bowie, brother of Lester Bowie, and he has been leading a somewhat more funk-than-punk group of his own called Defunkt around the New Wave clubs recently.[xvi]

In summary, Bangs’ Musician article captured Chance’s music just before the bandleader transitioned into the free jazz explorations of Sax Maniac. Bangs also included a riveting description of a nightclub performance, which I share in my closing comments.

Conclusion

Between 1980 and 1983, James Chance concluded the first chapter of his career. During this period, a new round of critics cemented Chance’s essential role in the history of American popular music. This acknowledgment stemmed from three influential recordings he released and his enduring impact since arriving in New York City, as detailed in Bangs’ article.

Chance’s press supporters handled a problem faced by all open-minded music journalists: how do you advocate for commercially unsuccessful but artistically innovative musicians? By examining Chance’s press support in the early 1980s, we understand how music journalists document the achievements of underrecognized musicians at the end of their initial period of influence.

Epilogue: The Anteater

Music writers paint portraits with words, and Bangs was the Edvard Munch of journalistic portraitists:

In a New York City nightclub, a skinny little Caucasian whose waterfall hairstyle and set of snout and lips make him look like a sullen anteater takes the stage, backed up by a couple of guitarists, bass, horn section, drummer and bongos. Most of his back-up is black, and they know their stuff: it’s pure James Brown funk, with just enough atonal accents to throw you off. The trombone player, in fact, looks familiar, and sounds amazing: you look a bit closer, and of course, that’s Joseph Bowie, brother of Lester, both of them avant-garde jazzmen of repute.

But then the anteater begins to sing, in a hoarse yowl that sounds more like someone being dragged naked through the broken glass and oily rubble of a back-alley than even the studied abrasiveness of most punk rock vocalizations. The songs are about contorting yourself, tying other people up and leaving them there, and how the singer doesn’t want to be happy. After a while he picks up an alto sax, and out comes some of the most hideous flurries of gurgling shrieks heard since the mid-Sixties glory days of ESP-Disk records. The singer/saxophonist’s name is James Chance, and you have been watching the Contortions.[xvii]

[i] N.H., “White Sound Could Be Tops for Dance,” Harlow Star, Sept. 29, 1983: 26.

[ii] Part 1: https://don-armstrong.com/2024/07/09/listening-to-the-unlistenable-mediating-james-chance-pt-1/

     Part 2: https://don-armstrong.com/2024/07/11/listening-to-the-unlistenable-mediating-james-chance-pt-2/

     Part 3: https://don-armstrong.com/2024/07/16/listening-to-the-unlistenable-mediating-james-chance-pt-3/

[iii] Hume married well-known music journalist Chet Flippo and became a leading country music writer.    

[iv] Martha Hume, “The Message is the Music,” New York Daily News, June 28, 1981: Leisure 17.

[v] Clint Roswell, “James White Goes on Record,” Daily News, March 7, 1982: B42.

[vi] Hugh Wyatt, “Disharmony Over Music UN Idea,” Daily News, Oct. 15, 1982: 313.

[vii] Robert Palmer, “They Stake Out the Frontiers of Rock,” New York Times, Oct. 31, 1982: Section 2, Page 2.

[viii] Robert Palmer, “They Stake Out the Frontiers of Rock,” New York Times, Oct. 31, 1982: Section 2, Page 2.

[ix] N.H., “White Sound Could Be Tops for Dance,” Harlow Star, Sept. 29, 1983: 26.

[x] N.H., “White Sound Could Be Tops for Dance,” Harlow Star, Sept. 29, 1983: 26.

[xi] Jon Pareles, “James Chance, No Wave and Punk-Funk Pioneer, Dies at 71,” New York Times, June 20, 2024: Webpage retrieved July 18, 2024: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/20/arts/music/james-chance-dead.html.

[xii] Lester Bangs, Free Jazz / Punk Rock, Musician Magazine, April-May 1980. Webpage retrieved July 13, 2024: https://www.notbored.org/bangs.html?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR2OxUqsPqh-4CE614Kd8iuvpZU2FkORk7y6rg6hDtEOQ8YAKbZLnXYGJsc_aem_BxNeQKJsBlZK5MucFy6TDg.

[xiii] Bangs’ excellent article appeared in neither of his post-mortem collections, an indication of the broader exclusion of  Chance’s music, and no wave, from histories of 1980s popular music. 

[xiv] Bangs, 1980.

[xv] Ibid.

[xvi] Ibid.

[xvii] Ibid.