Liner Notes from James Chance’s Irresistible Impulse + Sax Education
The collision of punk, jazz, noise rock and performance art make James Chance’s body of work ahead of his time for his most prolific period when he produced a hybrid of No Wave sounds in the early 80’s. He was contemporary, collaborator and friend to talents such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lydia Lunch, Brian Eno, Glenn O’Brien, John Lurie, and Debbie Harry and his influence can be directly seen in the work of musicians such as Sonic Youth, The Liars, Deerhoof, X-Ray Spex, The Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs and LCD Sound System.
This curated collection of photography, art, and writing came together in the last days of analog CDs and independent music publishing in New York City during the early aughts.
Somewhere around 2003 I had contributed to Hollis Queen’s artwork and design for her releases with her band LoHi. Hollis was the drummer behind Bosshog and was working on her first breakout independent work on Tiger Style Records. We had worked together in publishing and we became friends. She introduced me to Ari Sass from her label who reached out to see if I could support the creative direction and design for the James Chance catalogue. I had read about James Chance, Anya Phillips and Glenn O’Brien in the book Art After Midnight and I had seen Glenn speak at an creative director event.
It was stunning to absorb the research and the renewed impact James’s sound had on the current music and performance scene as well as the layers of interconnected biographies that feed the freeform punk and noise-art that germinated from his prolific influence.
The box set is out of print now but still in circulation and considered a collectible artifact. As a parishioner of event based performance and a lover of great stories it is with full respect that I am sharing the liner notes and art. I am always perpetually moved by Glenn O’Brien’s word craft, insights, observation, humanity, humor and impeccable gift of connoisseurship. James Chance’s articulation of his influences and collaborations adds fabric and color to the details of his sound. Contrary to the performative violence of his early stage antics I found James to be kind, generous and above all dedicated to his collaborators and fellow artists. The production of the boxset was a labor of love from Ari Sass and the now defunct Tiger Style Records ensemble of fans and creators.
The process around the design of the box set and curation of the 32 page story of James’s work involved interviews and conversations with James Chance and his contemporaries as well as reviewing and editing archival photography and films from the late Anya Phillips, Edo Bertoglio, Amos Poe, Marcia Resnick and Maripol.
The late Glenn O’Brien who wrote the primary liner notes on the box set was one of the most revered and insightful creative directors of our time. Although he is most known and imitated for his advertising work with Calvin Klien it was his recognition and advocacy of artists in his reviews for ArtForum and other various platforms that made him a true champion and defender of the erratic, violent beating heart of genius. He saw through the soul of the process and the impact of his times with a vivid observation and humor that is unmatched and evidenced here in his reflections on James, Anya and their inner circle. Most importantly aside of the adjacency of brilliance the accounts represented here are fragments of a love story in their most pure and sincere form. James and Anya were a contrarian and stylistic Bonnie and Clyde. The music and images are artifacts of the appetite for expression over flash or fame.
– Catherine Mouttet June 2022
James Chance: the Contortionist- by Glenn O’Brien
In the late 70s and early 80s, what is now called punk rock (but wasn’t then) was coming on strong. One admired the theater of it, but if you listened to punk you were hungry again fifteen minutes later. What the intelligent adult hedonist crowd was mostly listening to was the funk in all of its true manifestations, from the classical, like James Brown, King Floyd, Edwin Starr, Ike and Tina, Bobby Byrd, Lynn Collins the Female Preacher, et al. to the brave new funk, like P-Funk, Parliament, Funkadelic, the Brides of Funkenstein, the Ohio Players, the Gap Band, etc..
The cognoscenti of cool were still taking the pulse of jazz, looking for signs of life worth living, but jazz had generally gone South due to deaths, retirements, and widespread fusion damage. What had seemed genius coming from Miles — electric outerspace bop — had petered out into tech obsessed electric fartings and noodlings of cornball tendency, with a few notable exceptions, such as the Tony Williams Lifetime, Herbie Hancock, Weather Report, and Donald Byrd. There was Ornette Coleman and Mr. and Mrs. Bley, but the late seventies seemed almost completely deadendsville in jazz town when the new kids starting messing around with elements of what was close enough for jazz.
What happened has been called the No Wave, although its participants and partisans would have never used those words, which were a parody of new wave. I think that most of those associated with “No” bands would have agreed with Jean Luc Godard: “There are no new waves, there is only the ocean.” But there was something essentially “no” about them, because a lot of what one heard from “the No Wave,” especially as documented on Brian Eno’s “No New York” compilation, was arrived at by negation: it was about what it wasn’t. It wasn’t for the masses, it wasn’t stupid, it wasn’t negotiable. It wasn’t categorizable. No.
The Lounge Lizards rethought jazz, and were great undiscovered stars, but they weren’t adequately noticed in the outside world, perhaps in part because their leader John Lurie had jokingly said that they played “fake jazz” and if there is anything a jazz person hates it’s the idea that they’re not in on the joke. The Lounge Lizards still don’t get played on NPR. They should have been as big as Benny Goodman, but life stinks.
Still, genius was in profusion for a time in New York and who knew it wouldn’t last? DNA was a remarkable cubist power trio, a kind of deconstructionist Cream., and there was Mars, a mad science experiment at the corner of time and noise. But the real powerhouse, the most “no” band of all, the one that should have blown it all away and brought in the new era, was James Chance’s Contortions, the band that went on to break all the records that were never recorded.
James Chance first became a star on the tiny local scene as the saxophonist in Lydia Lunch’s Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, but soon he was conspiring to start his own band. The original Contortions was formed with a weird line up that included Pat Place and James Nares, the painter, on guitars, Adele Bertei on keyboards, and two Japanese guys, named Rek and Chico on bass and drums respectively. They looked like they were put together for appearance as much as anything, but the sound was coolly jarring. Before long James Chance put together the group that would create a unique, tight, black and white sound that is captured on “Buy Contortions:” Jody Harris on guitar, Donnie Christensen on drums, George Scott on bass, Pat Place on open tuned slide guitar and Adele Bertei on organ. Unlike the rest of the music world, in this one women were prominent, and after James, Pat was the scariest one in the band and Adele the kookiest, and their abstract musical styles, along with the tight rhythm section, made for a new sound.
That sound still has remarkable freshness. It can still make you nervous, make you tense and twitch to the point of moving your ass. The James Brown funk format is tightened up a notch, to the edge of frantic, with Pat Place’s oblique guitar exploding in tangents, Adele Bertei’s organ lurching in flat minor counterpoints, and James Chance’s soprano outbursts levitating above the fray like snake charming gone terribly wrong.
I have always been moved in new directions by the sound and vision of this band. I remember thinking long ago that James Chance should be the greatest star in the world. And then I realized that he was, really; it was just that almost nobody realized it. Only the very few. I knew at least a dozen or more thinking hedonists who knew at any one time that James Chance was the most exciting man in art and show business. I also observed that sometimes entire audiences noticed that James Chance was a great star. He was amazing. He burned the house down. He punched the audience in the face and they asked for more.
In a way the Contortions took jazz forward by taking it back to just before the moment when the artistic side and the entertainment sides parted ways. There’s a moment in Clint Eastwood’s earnest but dumb “Bird” where Charlie Parker freaks out at an exhibition of hot R & B sax playing a la King Curtis and loses his cool. This cliché is symbolic of everything that went wrong with bohemian culture. But clichés wilt in proximity to James Chance’s act. Not only was his music a precarious mix that made the name Contortions entirely apt, the whole enterprise was infused with a perfect air of insolent, coolly aggressive, vindictive existentialism. James Chance was a visionary who saw that the only way to create something new was to burn down the old. Where punk rock made negativity and rebellion into a cheap pop schtick, with a lot of dumb noise about “no future” and “destroy,” James was rebelling aesthetically and writings songs that combined a withering attitude with a deep groove, and sophisticated post bop chops with pop art hyper-jaded lyricism that transformed existential dread into a party.
Jazz had entirely ceased to be a dance music and become an entirely introspectator sport, in the process it lost everything below the waist. Jazz had lost its audience to rock and roll, but despite glorious moments, that too was quickly being frozen into cliché and caricature. Then this white dude with free licks comes boogalooing in on the pointiest shoes you’ve ever seen and it’s okay again for high IQ booty shaking. James Chances hated people just sitting there. So he sang, he danced, he blew his horn, and if that wasn’t enough, he punched them in the face or pulled their hair.
At the beginning of the Contortions, James was notorious for attacking the audience. James told the Soho News “If somebody comes to see me, they have to pay. And not just in money….New York people are such assholes — so cool and blasé. They think they can sit and listen to anything and it won’t affect them. So I decided I just had to go beyond music and physically assault them …The first time I actually did it, really hurt people, was in Soho. I really fucking hate Soho. It was at a benefit for this artsy magazine and all these artsy-fartsy people were sitting around on the floor — and if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s people sitting on the floor…I figured everybody was going to dance. But they just sat there on the floor. It made me so made, I just started kicking them, and I guess it just sort of went on from there.”
In a certain book on punk, James remembers a gig where he was grabbing people and slapping them around. “I walked through the whole place and people were just like backing up, but there was Anya Phillips giving me this look like, “Don’t you dare do that to me.”
It was love at first glare. Anya Phillips was a soul mate for James Siegfriend Chance White and she immediately hooked up with him and took over management of James and his band. She refined his look and his attitude. A supreme contrarian she had a gift for publicity that could have rivaled Andy Warhol’s. As soon as James began to get his propers from East Village crowd, Anya went on the attack.
Anya Phillips had been the primary theoretician behind the Mudd Club. I remember seeing her there in the first weeks that the club was open. People were dancing and Anya ran out on to the floor and began pummeling some girl I didn’t recognize. The job done, the girl crumpled in a heap on the floor, Anya came to the bar and I asked her what had happened. She said, “ I didn’t like the way that bitch was dancing.”
Anya brought a lot to the band, including a most refined sense of irony that was even tougher than James’s early violent antics. Anya took James “uptown,” and flaunted an exaggerated elitism, attacking the-suddenly-alive-with-new-hipness East Village as a tired, down scale, loser’s scene. Although she only moved up to the low E’30s, Anya acted like she and James were up there on Sutton Place dropping waterballoons off their penthouse.
Anya used to speak with amusing contempt of pot-smoking, flannel-shirted Television fans. Hippies!” was probably her worst form of put down. She bragged to the East Village Eye, the no wave paper of record: “Now I live on Murray Hill. James has two record contracts and we go to Macy’s every day. We’re light years aways from the kind of money I want to have, but we’ve certainly got more than any of our so-called contemporaries.”
James, who was introspective and secretly sweet by nature behind his glowering image, was a public monster. Inspired by Anya he cultivated an image that was isolationist, elitist, and aggressively negative. He told a writer: “The only thing I really like is Haitian voodoo drums, but I listen to that mainly to learn the rhythms. I mostly watch TV and take drugs.” There was some truth to that, and drugs were just one tactic that James and Anya used to alienate themselves from the conventionally cool. Actually there were a lot of things that James really liked, especially in the worlds of music and noir fiction, things like Chet Baker’s singing or James Brown’s keyboard playing.
Even Anya quietly smoked pot on occasion but her drug preferences were more in line with the old bebop set, a taste which seemed to help stimulate her provocatively outré quest for wealth against the grain of the down and out and loving it downtown scene. If she had lived Anya might have become America’s top fashion designer or a successful dictator, but she died.
You could say she was too intense and talented to live. She died of cancer at 26 in 1981. Most people thought Anya was mean and evil. She was mean, but she was, in the terms of the Shangri Las, “good bad but not evil.” She could have done so much more, but she did leave an extraordinary legacy in her influence on James’s bands and the scene in general.
Just when people were getting used to the idea of the noisy, intelligent music that was coming from downtown New York and other urban outposts, and at the same time rock and roll America was moving into it’s crypto-racist “Disco Sucks” phase, James Chance and Anya Phillips went disco. The Contortions became James White and the Blacks — and James proceeded to do to disco what he had done to the funk.
These records not only had the sound, they had the attitude — perfect packaging and a murderously post-chic atmosphere. They were the revolution, whether one realized it or not. The Contortions was the first chic death fashion pop art band since the Velvet Underground, and it sounded better than if if Iggy had gone to Julliard.
Chance’s vocal on Contort Yourself reaches a degree of droll dryness rarely attempted by Mick Jagger or even Lou Reed — combination of Mose Allison on Methadone jazz vocalization and an evil mind control guru. It’s a groovy epic vision of world transformation through disco-self-destruction, taunting “Why don’t you trying being stupid instead of smart?”
Exactly.
Chance combined elements of funk, jazz, and disco with the hardness of rock and a nuclear show biz assault to create an extraordinary experience, musical, ritual, social, artistic (although James would be the first to deny that) and, of course, anti-social (a better word for political.) With his pompadour combed high and dressed to the nth in black light black tie, he vibrated across the stage like an undead James Brown, crooning, growling, wailing his sax in cogent, cryptic runs and occasionally attacking the audience when it offended him. Check out the instrumental tracks on James White and the Blacks, combining funk groove and free jazz improv structures in a new way, and then blowing mad edged out electric guitar through them. This stuff is still unsurpassed. It is the veritable razor’s edge, so hard yet funky, so nasty but so cool, it’s beyond the valley of Miles’s “On the Corner” or Beefheart at his best.
Taking a page from Parliament/Funkadelic which sold the same funk in multiple brands (including Bootsy, Parlet, the Brides of Funkenstein, etc..) James and Anya had the Contortions, James White and the Blacks, and then spun off an instrumental funk jazz combo, The Flaming Demonics. I guess it was a way to get more gigs, and in a hipper world, more record contracts. Mainly it was a way for James to extend his range and produce.
James Chance always had an interesting band, which was as cast as it was auditioned, and it was always good although sometimes when he changed personnel it was hard to understand precisely why they were good at first, because each new line-up had to push the ear to the edge of discomfort.
James experimented with lineups that mixed tight black funk session players, hipster elite jazzmen, and flamboyantly eccentric art world personalities. Finally he wound up with a dead serious funk band, James White and the Blacks in which the Blacks were literally all black and as talented and credentialed as any jazz combo around. What a band that was — the one you can see in Downtown 81. But each version of his bands had its own genius, and as Robert Palmer once pointed out the people who played in the Contortions “weren’t always professionals, but they were always musicians.”
The list of Contortions, Blacks and Flaming Demonics veterans is amazing in its diversity, and each member brought some special gift, whether it was virtuosity, personality or demonic possession: Steven Kramer, Lester Bowie, Kristian Hoffman, Bradley Field, Patrick Geoffrois, Albert MacDowell, Richie Harrison, Colin Wade, Bern Nix, Joe Bowie, Byron Bowie, Melvin Gibbs, Greg Barrett, Fred Wells, Lorenzo Wyche, Bobby Etheridge, John Purcell, Tomas Doncker, Jerry Antonius, Chris Cunningham, Colin Wade, Robert Arron and, of course the Discolitas:Bemshi and Cheri Marilyn.
James Chance’s music changed constantly. He told Allen Platt: “I believe in being dissatisfied at all times. If I could be said to believe in anything, I believe that.”
He played new music that was new by method, informed by history, contemptuous of the future and totally based in the present. It worked like a juju charm. To hear it was to be changed. He was a performer in the greater sense of the word. He carried the work through to completion. He got results. He executed. And he never failed. He never quit. He had reverses, but really it was the scene that died, not the vision of James Chance.
I remember wondering if Mick Jagger had ever seen James play, because I thought that if he did, he’d have to retire. But the fact that he never did become a household name doesn’t detract from the importance of his music. It’s still stunning and exciting. It still sounds new. Somehow I see James as a sort of “our Duke Ellington,” although I can’t get into who “we” are.
After witnessing James and a new version of the Contortions in March 1980, Kurt Loder wrote in Rolling Stone “One major shot (say an appearance on Saturday Night Live) is all he needs to prove he’s the most innovative white R & B musicians in America. Let’s hope he gets it soon.”
Well he didn’t. Too bad for you. Maybe in another universe he might have become popular and then you could still smoke in restaurants and Bush wouldn’t be president, but there’s no use crying over spilled guts.
James is still working, but not hard, but perhaps it’s better to say he’s still playing; he’s still playing hard. He has contrived to live without selling out, and if he doesn’t have all the money that he and Anya held up as a goal, he still knows he has the rights to it, and he still lives the way he wants to, which is a rare thing. Ambition seems beneath him at this point, and one senses that the music he’s making now, and his new band, the Sardonic Sinphonics, are primarily for his own amusement. He is a kind of invisible eminence in New York, but somehow I fully expect him to emerge from his semi-reclusive state when least expected and assume his rightful mantle as the leading band leader and head us into uncharted territory with a hot set of horn charts.
Dude is like Louis Prima and Paul Desmond rolled into Eminem.
Liner Notes from Sax Education — James Chance
Although I seem to have attained the rank of some improbable elder statesman in today’s touristy theme park version of Manhattan, there is very little here to hold my attention to the present. I’d prefer to go back to a time when my universe and that of my associates consisted of two dark dives (CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City) and the literally deconstructed half square mile or so of urban wilderness surrounding them. But what this scene lacked in size it more than made up for in sheer intensity.
Our music was much more than a mere “art statement” or a vehicle to realize mass-produced fantasies of celebrity — 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 live we could conceive of — with an undiluted creativity and original style that is still being copied twenty five years later.
I’ve tried to select for this compilation tracks featuring most of the Contortions/James White and the Blacks lineups I performed with from the late 1970’s through the mid 80’s. The earliest cut, “Throw Me Away” is an excursion to the edge of blind abandon by the original Contortions, recorded live at CBGB’s in June ’78, shortly after “No New York” was recorded. George Scott’s volatile bass and Adele Bertei’s haunted Acetone organ are especially effective.
When Michael Zilkha of ZE Records asked me to record a “disco” album (which became “Off White”) I slowed my signature tune “Contort Yourself” down from its original breakneck tempo to one I thought was more moderate, and featured some smoldering guitar work from Jody Harris. Although this version, the first one heard here, had a flavor of disco, we decided we needed the real article. So August Darnell of Kid Creole and the Coconuts (also ZE artists) was brought in to do a remix that turned into a virtual rewrite. August stripped my track down to just George Scott’s bass and Don Christensen’s drums and physically slowed the tape down, creating a lot of space, which he filled with percussion, hypnotic background vocals by Anya Phillips and a new fiendishly catchy guitar part. Also from the “Off White” album is the instrumental “Off Black” which besides some stinging slide from Pat Place, features a blistering guitar solo by Bob Quine over dissonant multi-tracked sax harmonies by myself.
From “Buy The Contortions” we have “Designed To Kill”, “Roving Eye”, and “Bedroom Athlete”, with David Hofstra on his fretless Fender bass replacing George Scott, who stalked out in the middle of a recording session and never returned. I remember working and reworking the lyrics of these tunes in my head as I made my nightly solitary rounds, usually starting at obscure artists’ bars in Tribeca like Barnabus Rex and later wending my way to CB’s or Max’s. Once coming out of Mickey Ruskin’s Lower Manhattan Ocean Club, drunk and distracted, I was struck by a slow moving car. When the driver offered me a ride to the nearest emergency room, I told him to just drop me off at CBGB’s and proceeded to further anesthetize myself.
It was three turbulent years after “Off White” and “Buy” were released in 1979 before I returned to a recording studio. After the breakup of the original Contortions in June ’79, I changed the personnel of my various groups at a dizzying pace as the New York scene exploded, going through three completely different lineups in 1980 alone. There were new clubs like Danceteria and the Peppermint Lounge all over Manhattan now and I prided myself on presenting new influences and musicians at almost every show. But these years were also darkened by the illness and death from cancer of my manager/lover/creative partner Anya Phillips.
The live set here was recorded in Einhoven, Holland in August 1981, less than two months after Anya’s death. It’s about the most minimal sounding group I ever had and there’s a reason for it. I was working at the time with some inexperienced young players who apparently panicked at the thought of leaving the for Europe and didn’t show up at the airport — except for bassist Colin Wade and backup singer Cherie Marilyn, who’d been with me longer. I was forced to send for replacements from New York, sound and sight unseen. The guitarist, Colin’s brother, was no virtuoso, but the superb funk drummer Ralph Rolle ended up staying with the band for the next two years.
When I got back to New York I hired two downtown guitarists, Jerry Agony and Chris Cunningham, who also happened to be close friends. With Ralph Rolle and Colin Wade (later replaced on bass by Rodney Forstall), this became the very tight rhythm section that played on the Sax Maniac, Flaming Demonics and Melt Yourself Down sessions. It’s a shame that Anya didn’t live for the recording of Sax Maniac, because she came up with the ideas for many of the songs including the title track, heard here on the live set, and the twisted dance number, The Twitch.
I’m still very proud of the horn section on tracks like The Devil Made Me Do It (from Flaming Demonics) and The Twitch. Check out Robert Arron on tenor sax “blow till his face turns cherry red” and Luther Thomas on bari and alto “way up in the stratosphere / so high you can’t even hear.” On trumpet there’s Ray Maldanado, who sadly OD’ed not long after the Sax Maniac record date. “Sax Machine” features the Discolitas (Robin Marlowe and Cherie Marilyn) deadpanning some of my most salacious lyrics and Defunkt’s Joe Bowie on trombone. Incidentally, “Sax Machine” uses the same basic riff as “Hell On Earth”, heard on the live set. Then there’s my discofied arrangement of “Jaded” with its double tracked keyboard solo (quoting Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood”) and melodramatic over the top vocal. “Jaded”’s lyrics were written for my first love in New York City, Mars drummer Nancy Arlen.
Finally we have the insinuating “HypNoTease” from a 1988 session co-produced by myself, guitarist Jerry Agony and the alluring Judy Taylor, and featuring one of my earliest musical associates from my conservatory days, trumpeter Brian Lynch. By this time the scene of the early ’80s was already just a memory, and I was headed for a long stretch of exile in music business Siberia…
But fuck that, it’s time for you to get your advanced sax education as well as some serious sax therapy, and you’d better pay close attention and learn to dance this mess, ’cause after this record is over, there’s gonna be a multiple choice test.
–James Chance
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