Wasteland Survivor: James Chance keeps making it, any way he can.

His legacy as an audience-battering misanthrope notwithstanding, James Chance speaks with amiable humility. When asked about his impact on voguish, local acts like the Liars or Flux Information Sciences, he replies, "It was a total surprise. People keep telling me these bands are really influenced by me, but I haven’t heard any of them." He scoffs at suggestions that he teach lessons in his singular horn style, which abuses the free squall of Albert Ayler or Roscoe Mitchell with quasi-Middle Eastern dissonance and R&B honks. "I don’t see why anyone would learn to play the sax like me."

But Chance (nee James White, born James Siegfried) figures prominently in New York’s—and America’s—musical history. As the boss of the Contortions, he helped define the late-70s no-wave vanguard, which spawned generations of revolutionary chaos-mongers as disparate as Sonic Youth and the Flying Luttenbachers. Leading the equally subversive but more commercial James White and the Blacks, he became the first entertainer to fuse punk antipathy with frictional, James Brown-style funk and slippery jazz exotica. You can thank him for Liquid Liquid’s elegance or the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ atrocities, but don’t dismiss Chance for the propagation of his ideas.

"I have a certain sophistication that most of the people influenced by me have never achieved," he acknowledges, sipping a Captain Morgan and Coke in the spotless, antique-filled apartment he shares with his hospitable flame, Judy Taylor.

Capitalizing on his renewed visibility, Tiger Style Records issued Irresistible Impulse, a regal, bonus-filled box set of Chance’s initial four studio albums. Though it irresponsibly omits the Contortions’ key contributions to the feral, Brian Eno-produced No New York compilation (Antilles, 1978), the retrospective handily amasses the manic virulence of 1979’s Buy the Contortions, the concurrent mutant-groove of the Blacks’ Off White, 1982’s limber, polished Sax Maniac and 1983’s damnation-themed Flaming Demonics.

A conservatory-trained altoist from Milwaukee, Chance arrived in Manhattan in December, 1975, intent on infiltrating the loft-jazz community. He wound up venting his frustrations instead. "It soon became clear that I wasn’t gonna make it on the jazz scene," he recalls. "A lot of those musicians couldn’t deal with me. I even got into some audience confrontations with some of the jazz gigs, which really freaked them out. When it came time for my solo, there were all these people sitting cross-legged on the floor. I just started playing the sax in their faces. The audience bugged me. They were such hippies. I just wanted to upset them."

And so he did. From 1976 until 1977, he participated in an embryonic version of Lydia Lunch’s trenchant Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. He subsequently formed the Contortions, whose most celebrated incarnation—guitarist Jody Harris, slide guitarist Pat Place, drummer Don Christensen, organist Adele Bertei and since-deceased bassist George Scott—solidified in 1978. But the aspirations of Chance and his manager-turned-girlfriend, Anya Phillips, contrasted with those of their peers.

"I was coming from a different place than the other no-wave bands. I never wanted to be considered just an art band. I wanted to have something that was danceable and that could appeal to more of a rock audience. People from Soho and Tribeca originally came to those no-wave shows. They just sat there, looking cool, acting like they were above it all. It was the same thing as the jazz scene. I couldn’t stand to see that, especially with a rock band. I’m from the Midwest; in the Midwest, everybody dances. I wanted to get people up on their feet, so I started wandering through the audience, grabbing people and making them stand up. Some of them started fighting back."

One such onlooker was the Village Voice’s self-proclaimed "dean" of rock critics, Robert Christgau. "I was in a real altered state," says Chance. "I started attacking people, and apparently I shoved his girlfriend into a wall or something. He defended her, but it’s gotten exaggerated. People say I put his girlfriend in the hospital; that’s not true. I never really intended to hurt anybody. I was just out to get a rise out of them."

Chance’s callously howled lyrics and titles such as "Designed to Kill," "White Cannibal" and "Disposable You" complemented his onstage demeanor. "I’ve felt disgusted with the human condition ever since I can remember. I just think it’s a bad joke. Some people would say that’s negative, I just think it’s real."

When he signed the Contortions, ZE Records chief Michael Zilkha also requested that Chance concoct a disco LP. The group’s alterego, James White and the Blacks, rose to the occasion, bleaching the boogie wonderland and eventually adopting brass sections, percussionists, go-go dancers and backup singers.

The frontman’s fashion sense blossomed as well. "Anya put the whole [pompadour] look together, which I’ve stuck to ever since. This was the way I had always wanted to look. For a while, we had the whole band in these sharkskin suits. It was difficult to get them to wear those."

The James White persona’s irreverent interviews even provoked ridiculous accusations of bigotry. "It came from a few misinterpreted comments I made. Of course, I’m celebrating black music and culture. I’ve had bands that were completely black! I was the one that brought black music onto the whole punk scene, and I took a lot of shit for it. There were people on the scene who were real racists that were very upset by what I was doing.

"I love black music, but I don’t put it on a pedestal. Black people have always created this great music, and then they abandon it; the majority of them don’t wanna do anything old. I was just playing with my whole image of a white person doing black music. It puts you in a kind of ambivalent position. People take things a lot more seriously than they’re meant. And white people have this guilt, which makes them so afraid of being called ‘racist’ that they don’t see the humor in anything."

Mired by internal and contractual squabbles, the classic Contortions and Blacks lineups disintegrated. By 1980, Chance exclusively employed rotating funk sessionmen and respected jazzbos alongside renegade downtown oddballs. Following Phillips’ death from cancer in 1981, he grew more reclusive, practically disappearing as the decade closed.

"I was making it any way I could," he remembers. "I’ve done a lot of things that weren’t exactly legal."

Armed with another set of Contortions, Chance resumed activity in 1995. His tuneful, traditional side emerged during performances both solo and with acoustic-jazz combos. Harris, Place and Christensen returned for shockingly vital reunion dates in 1996 and 2001. "Now, I don’t wanna use the name ‘Contortions’ unless it’s that band [playing]," he says.

His latest project is the slightly demented but smoother Down and Dirty, a forthcoming cocktail-hour CD by his noirish Terminal City ensemble. "I was always a real enemy of harmony," he notes. "But lately, I kind of abandoned that. It was really liberating. I started listening to Art Pepper, Chet Baker—stuff that’s considered ‘cool jazz.’ But really, when you listen to it, it’s not that cool. It’s got this real strong emotion." He’s planning future Contortions gigs, too.

So how does Chance reflect on his 27 years in the trenches? "I really feel like one of the survivors," he says. "Not many people from that time are still living here and playing music. A lot of them are dead. A lot just couldn’t handle how New York changed. When I first came here, my apartment cost $105. If you wanted to do some kind of creative thing, you could survive without this total hustle just to have a roof over your head. There was a real scene happening that was more than the sum of its parts. Now it’s just been turned into this wasteland."