JAMES CHANCE & TERMINAL CITY “THE FIX IS IN” (Interbang Records, 2010)

James Siegfried, the white James Brown, represented at the best the spirit of NY no-wave: the desecration of the dead bodies of the traditional rock, jazz and funk music, reinventing their style and the use itself of their instruments. But to do this, it was necessary to have a full awareness of what preceded it . This album shows how behind the desire – and the necessity – to progress towards the new and the aunherad-of, there was in any case the love and the respect for a golden age, in turn an element of cultural renewal and social revolution. In particular, this album tracks pay homage to the old American movies soundtracks and to the whole decadent, but at the same time exciting and adventurous world, represented by them. James himself says: “the stuff I’m doing now is very influenced by Film Noir. The new album actually has a few songs named after movies. Like, “The Set up,” “The Street with no Name.” The song “Down and Dirty” was kind of inspired by a scene in The Man With The Golden Arm where Frank Sinatra deals the cards and says, “Here they come now, down and dirty”. And “Down and Dirty”  was exactly the title of the first version of this album, initially been issued in cd just in Iapan in the 2006 for the Wind Bell and then presented again by the French Label Le Son du Maquis with the title “The Fix is in” (this too is an album track); finally in the 2010 the collaboration between the italian Interbang and Maquis gave life to two different vinyl versions, an italian and a french one (with different covers, both in limited editions of 500 copies). For this jazz and r’n’b project, genres that he loves since his adolescence, James thought well of surround himself with a large group of musicians (in “Devilish Angel” there is also a cameo of Pat Place from Contorsions), as to ricreate a real jazz band from the ‘30s/’40s. An unheard-of James Chance so, sometimes elegant, sometimes languid, maybe a little bit bootlicker, nostalgic and melancoholic for sure, confronting himself with the traditional and conventional melody (he defines it “a liberation from freedom”), with his young passions, with his past myths and with the noir atmospheres of the old streets of New York where he lives, “that streets with no name where the fix is always in” – as he would like to close a stylistic and emotional circle, all interior, in order to define a dimension in wich he feels comfortable, “a kind of heightened hyper-reality that is often more real to me, and centainly more true, than the affectless flatness of our so-called “new” millennium”.

Interbang Records: http://www.interbangrecords.com/label/releases/ibr005/
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/interbangrecords/sets/james-chance-the-fix-is-in