\n<\/p>\n
James Chance, the singer, saxophonist and composer who melded punk, funk and free jazz into bristling dance music as the leader of the Contortions, died on Tuesday<\/a> in Manhattan. He was 71.<\/p>\n His brother, David Siegfried, said Mr. Chance had been in declining health for years and succumbed to complications of gastrointestinal disease at the Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center in East Harlem.<\/p>\n During the late 1970s explosion of punk culture in New York City, the Contortions were at the forefront of a style called no wave \u2014 music that set out to be as confrontational and radical in sound and performance as punk\u2019s fashion and attitude were visually.<\/p>\n Contortions songs like \u201cI Can\u2019t Stand Myself\u201d<\/a> and \u201cThrow Me Away\u201d filled the rhythmic structures of James Brown\u2019s funk with angular, dissonant riffs, to be topped by Mr. Chance\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Although the Contortions often performed in suits and ties, their music and stage presence were proudly abrasive. In the band\u2019s early days, Mr. Chance was so determined to get a reaction from arty, detached spectators that he would jump into the audience and slap or kiss someone. Audience members often fought back.<\/p>\n \u201cI got a big kick out of provoking people, I don\u2019t deny that,\u201d Mr. Chance said in a 2003 interview with Pitchfork<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Adele Bertei, who played keyboards in the Contortions, said: \u201cIt was a kind of musical Brutalism. We really wanted to destroy ideas of art as elitist \u2014 and of punk as musically revolutionary, when it really was just about a three-chord progression.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Chance, she added, \u201cwas so singular in his musical vision, in his presence, in his will to smash all conformity into pieces, that he will never be forgotten by anyone who experienced his music live. It was kind of insane, but kind of brilliant, the physicality of it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Chance was born James Siegfried on April 20, 1953, in Milwaukee. His father, Donald Siegfried, was the business manager for a Wisconsin school district. His mother, Jean, taught elementary school; she survives him, along with his brother, David, and his sisters Jill Siegfried and Mary Koehler.<\/p>\n James Siegfried studied classical piano with nuns in his elementary school when he was 7 years old; it bored him. But when he was 11, a jazz teacher taught him to play standards and stride piano. During the late 1960s, he soaked up the era\u2019s rock. He briefly attended Michigan State University, then returned to Milwaukee and studied jazz at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, where he picked up the alto saxophone and started playing free jazz.<\/p>\n Late in 1975, he moved to New York City, drawn by reporting in The Village Voice about the punk-rock incubator CBGB and the loft jazz scene. He frequented both.<\/p>\n \u201cI went to jazz sessions at places like the Tin Palace, which was a half a block from CBGB\u2019s,\u201d he told Glenn O\u2019Brien in 2011.<\/a> \u201cBut there was no overlap. Nobody who went to the Tin Palace would ever go to CBGB\u2019s, or vice versa.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He took lessons from a loft jazz master, the tenor saxophonist David Murray, and started a jazz group, Flaming Youth. But he disliked the studious jazz audience.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cHe wanted people to be dancing,\u201d said Sylvia Reed, a lifelong friend who was briefly Mr. Chance\u2019s manager. \u201cHe wanted to pull people off the floor.\u201d<\/p>\n He also soon realized that \u201cI wasn\u2019t going to make it in the jazz scene,\u201d Mr. Chance said in 2011. \u201cToo many guys could play sax better than me.\u201d He met Lydia Lunch, a pioneering no wave performer, at CBGB; shared his Lower East Side apartment with her; and played with her band, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, for much of 1977. He started the Contortions after Ms. Lunch decided her band didn\u2019t need a saxophone.<\/p>\n By then, he was performing as James Chance. \u201cHe wanted a stage name that sounded like it could be a real name, not a silly punk name like Rotten,\u201d David Siegfried said. \u201cHe was also really into film noir, and it fit with that.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Siegfried added, \u201cBehind that combative stage persona, James was reclusive, shy and softhearted.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n A loose movement of boundary-defying musicians and visual artists coalesced as no wave with a series of five concerts at the Soho gallery Artists Space in May 1978.<\/a> The series was attended by Brian Eno, a producer who chose the Contortions and three other bands \u2014 Mars, DNA and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks \u2014 to share a compilation album that would endure as a document of a pivotal artistic moment: \u201cNo New York.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Chance found a catalyst in Anya Phillips<\/a>, a fashion designer and photojournalist who became his girlfriend and manager, promoting the band and honing his theatricality as a frontman. The Contortions regularly filled New York City clubs \u2014 mostly Max\u2019s Kansas City, which had an ongoing rivalry with CBGB.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cHe was a chameleon,\u201d Deborah Harry of Blondie, an occasional guest singer with Mr. Chance,<\/a> said. \u201cHe could lure you in with being so cute and so jerky, with the whole downtown thing. But then he would do things that were really very advanced musically.\u201d<\/p>\n The band got a recording contract with Ze Records and in 1979 released the album \u201cBuy,\u201d which captured crisp studio versions of Mr. Chance\u2019s songs. More raucous live recordings would be released after the early Contortions broke up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Noisy as it seemed, the music was tautly constructed, as Mr. Chance explained to Pitchfork. \u201cInstead of chord changes, I wrote a part for each instrument, starting from the bass and building it up from there. Interlocking rhythmic melodies. It\u2019s very structured,\u201d he said. \u201cSongs are actually all written out in charts.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Michael Zilkha, the owner of Ze Records, prompted Mr. Chance to make a \u201cdisco record,\u201d leaving it to Mr. Chance to decide what that meant. Mr. Chance was well aware of racial tensions between the largely white New York punk scene and Black-rooted jazz and disco; the Contortions made a point of playing cover versions of R&B songs in their sets. Mr. Chance exposed and challenged the racial divide, naming his disco project James White and the Blacks and titling the album \u201cOff White,\u201d also released in 1979. Its songs included \u201cWhite Savages,\u201d \u201cAlmost Black,\u201d \u201cWhite Devil\u201d and \u201cBleached Black.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Recorded by the Contortions band and guests including Ms. Lunch, most of the songs moved only slightly closer to mainstream pop and dance music. But the group did rework a jagged Contortions song, \u201cContort Yourself,\u201d<\/a> with a disco beat<\/a> and approved an extended remix.<\/a><\/p>\n The Contortions broke up in 1979 because of conflicts over money and personalities. Mr. Chance had also developed a heroin addiction that would affect him for the rest of his life. Former Contortions members went on to start bands including Bush Tetras, the Raybeats and 8 Eyed Spy.<\/p>\n Mr. Chance formed a new lineup of James White and the Blacks, featuring Black sidemen from the trombonist Joseph Bowie\u2019s band Defunkt. It released the album \u201cSax Maniac\u201d<\/a> in 1982; a different lineup released the album \u201cMelt Yourself Down\u201d in 1986.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n By the end of the 1980s, Mr. Chance had grown disillusioned with the music business, and his addiction had also deepened. But in 2001, he reconciled with surviving 1970s Contortions band members and returned to performing with them<\/a> and other musicians. A French band that had been hurriedly convened for a festival performance stayed together to perform and tour with him; they were billed as James Chance and Les Contortions and they released the full album \u201cIncorrigible!\u201d in 2012.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ms. Reed said that Mr. Chance had also recorded a trove of solo piano music that may eventually be released.<\/p>\n Mr. Chance gave his last live performances in 2019. In 2018, younger admirers of his punk funk brought him to a nationwide audience when the Scottish band Franz Ferdinand added him as a surprise guest on \u201cThe Late Show with Stephen Colbert.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Chance played a jabbing, dissonant, squealing alto sax solo, delivering it with a signature James Brown move: a drop to his knees.<\/p>\n In liner notes to a 2010 compilation, \u201cTwist Your Soul,\u201d Mr. Chance wrote, \u201cOur music was much more than a mere art statement or a vehicle to realize mass-produced fantasies of celebrity \u2014 we lived it. Fame, fortune and the future were irrelevant. We may have been self-absorbed, but we were bent on pushing our music and our lives to the furthest limit we could conceive of.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n