The abominable hyper-fusion of James Chance refers to several masters, traditionally distant from each other: Albert Ayler for the playful and dissonant use of the saxophone, Captain Beefheart for the lycanthropic vocalizations, James Brown for the danceable rhythms, and the minimalist school for the obsessive repetition of a few phrases ad infinitum. Overall, it is the boldest fusion operation attempted by the new wave.

Chance�s pop-oriented music is in fact among the most experimental music of the 1980s. He attacks the structure of the rock song from an angle no one had ever approached: dissonance is not just an incidental episode, but assumes the leading role traditionally reserved for melody.

An innovative saxophonist, Chance turned his music into a kind of ego trip. Despotic and uncompromising, he elevated incommunicability to the foundation of both art and life.

James Siegfried, a gruff and arrogant young man from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, expelled from his conservatory for misconduct, arrived in New York carrying an adolescence devoted to rhythm and blues and free jazz.

Disillusioned with the �creative� attics of the new jazz, Siegfried ventured into nightclubs, quickly joining dubious entertainment bands, including Jody Harris�s Screws and Lydia Lunch�s Teenage Jesus.

At the end of 1977, having renamed himself James White, the saxophonist formed the Contortions, bringing together Jody Harris, bassist George Scott, guitarist Pat Place, German organist Adele Bertei (who had debuted in one of Peter Laughner�s early bands and had moved to New York with him), and drummer Don Christensen. The combo became the spokesperson for an ultra-fusion that brazenly mixed free jazz and funky soul, showcasing the aggressive and negative edge of the new punk generation, and making dissonance (especially Harris�s guitar and Chance�s sax) the central pillar of their sound.

The sextet gained a certain fame, and Chance in particular became famous and feared for his absolute disregard toward the audience, often directing insults and obscene gestures at them. The spastic, neurotic, and paroxysmal soul of Dish It Out, the martial mini-concert that is Flip Your Face, and the psychedelic free jazz jam Jaded (on the 1978 compilation No New York) took on a punk edge through Chance�s manic screams, dedicated to shocking with perverse eroticism and other obsessions. The sound, so spasmodic, defiant, and vibrant, is conceptually close to the Freudian miniatures of Teenage Jesus.

Crucial is the contribution of the supporting musicians: the shrill lashes of Harris�s guitar, the cyanotic bruises of Bertei�s organ, the stuttering riffs of Scott�s bass, the sharp counterpoint of Place�s slide guitar, the senseless crash of Christensen�s drums. The lineup is absurdly cohesive, sadistically determined to carry out their funk-punk torment in the most depraved way.

Chance now exercised a small dictatorship over the band and put himself on display both through provocative clothing (tailcoat and bow tie) and through frenzied statements, in which he preached the absolute importance of rhythm (according to the religion of James Brown), professed a visceral hatred of jazz, and a great love instead for �disco,� which in his view signaled the advent of an era of nothing but sex and drugs.

In 1979, two records were released simultaneously: Buy Contortions (Ze, 1979) by the Contortions (without Bertei but with numerous guests) and Off White (Ze, 1979) by James White (Chance�s new surname). Both demonstrate a decisive return to the forms of danceable music. With the furious vocals and dissonant sax intact, the funky rhythm takes over. The sound regenerates, evolving from an incipient sonic collapse to an effervescent nebula, with the residual noise that supports it becoming cleaner and more regular.

Buy is the transfiguration of funk. The compositions, austere and impeccable, rest on the contrast between the sax�s free phrases and the pulsating syncopated rhythm imposed by the other instruments. The principle of extreme ambiguity as ultimate modernity finds its most brazen expression in the bodily drive of I Don�t Want To Be Happy, the track closest to �disco music,� in Design To Kill, devastated by the most psychopathic screams, in Throw Me Away, with minimalist phrasing, and in the anti-consumerist summa of the possibilities of new dance music Contort Yourself, an anthem to contortion as the future mutation of dance.

The long instrumental passages upon which each track is built give a sense of the identity between contortion and distortion, especially those with the most fragmented harmonies, such as the demented lullaby of My Infatuation, featuring the most dissonant duet between Harris and Chance, Roving Eye, a dissolute and almost Hendrixian bacchanal, and Bedroom Athlete, plagued by the most irritating guitar stabs.

Off is the �disco� version of the Contortions: the dazzling Contort Yourself is presented as an introduction in a tropical version, punctuated by handclaps and sung with elegance, complete with a female chorus; Stained Sheets is a parody of Donna Summer�s orgasmic tracks, staged with the complicity of Stella Rico, dispenser of moans and sighs.
The second side of the record features four instrumental tracks (more or less random assortments of rhythms and instrumental noises) that showcase, in the most brilliant way, the ambitions of rock�s most urban saxophone. White blows without restraint, producing the most indecent sounds. More than dissonances, �no-dissonances.� If White Savages is the most frenzied track, if White Devil pits his charlatan sax against Lunch�s rough atonal guitar, if Bleached Black is a pure pretext for nocturnal sax gargling with the spice of an equally dissonant violin echoing him, it is Off Black that is the key track, the one in which the sense of White�s cacophonic pandemonium emerges most clearly: even amid the combustion of dissonances and distortions, a rhythmic guitar phrase and a melodic (so-called) saxophone phrase repeat, deforming frenetically in a minimalist fashion for seven minutes, seeking trance more than dance.

With calculated megalomania, White titles two tracks after his own pseudonym and two after its chromatic opposite: the white-black dichotomy is a tribute to Black music, which began the history of modern dance music with rhythm and blues, and at the same time a comment on the nightclub use made of it by whites; but it is also an admission of an unresolved contradiction, that of white versus black, Western art music versus Black popular music, a contradiction that may well be the primary cause of his violent maelstroms of the absurd.

Males (Scott, Harris, Christensen) and females (Place and Bertei) split, the former forming the Raybeats, the latter the Bush Tetras. Left alone, White wanders with various improvised lineups. A brief experience with Arto Lindsay in the Pill Factory produces a couple of high-class avant-garde pieces: Schleyer's Tires, all percussive noise (made only of thuds and clicks) and Mr Graw Army Base (a saxophone endlessly repeating the same note to the rhythm of a martial drum).

Bertei also played in Aural Exciters, a project by producer August Darnell, documented on Spooks In Space (1979).

Then Chance moved to Paris, where he recorded Live Au Bain Douches (Invisible, 1980). The album features the hallucinatory fanfare of I Danced With A Zombie and the wild jazz-rock of Put Me Back In My Cage, alongside rhythm and blues classics (notably his performance on James Brown�s King Heroin) and scattered self-references. His saxophone feats are countless. White vents his hysteria through the instrument, producing grotesque notes. And when he doesn�t play, he sings�which is even worse, with the voice of a hardened punk hooligan. He is accompanied by a section more jazz than funky, enhancing the neurosis and evoking the atmosphere of a 1950s underground club.

In 1981, his girlfriend and manager died of cancer. Disgusting in interactions with journalists and loquacious during live shows, Chance seems to vent his desolate existential solitude through verbal and saxophone excess.

For Sax Maniac (Animal, 1982), Chance uses an extended lineup: Joseph Bowie on trombone, a female chorus, Luther Thomas on baritone sax, two trumpets, two guitars, bass, and percussion. With such a full-scale dance band, he unleashes his megalomania: he attacks disco music with a grotesque, underplayed Farfisa jazz solo (Disco Jaded), later devours it in cannibalistic imitations of Black vocalists, duets frantically with a trumpet on The Twitch, and raves senselessly amid a forest of accompaniment on Sax Maniac. Fusion reaches absurdity when all elements overlap simultaneously, with dissonances and syncopations alternating with funky horns and �disco� backing vocals (Irresistible Impulse), along with delusional self-celebrations a` la James Brown (Sax Machine).

Flaming Demonics (Ze, 1983) runs along the same self-indulgent tracks of neurotic rhythm and blues. But by stubbornly refusing to invent new themes or engage in spectacular improvisations, Chance heads toward a premeditated artistic suicide, which his arrogant demonic drive is not enough to avert.

Molotov Cocktail Lounge (1996) marks White�s return to the scene (albeit somewhat quietly).

Irresistible Impulse (Tiger Style, 2003) is a four-disc career retrospective.

Adele Bertei formed an all-girl band, the Bloods, which released only a single, and then recorded a solo album, Little Lives Big Love (1988), followed by Zami Girl (1994), while she was devoting more and more time to cinema and television. She formed Anubian Lights in 2003, a project that released The Eternal Sky (1995), Let Not The Flame Die Out (1998), Naz Bar (2001), Phantascope (2004), and Touch My Evil (2006) with Lydia Lunch.

James White returned with Incorrigible! (2011) The Flesh Is Weak and (2016).