Irresistible Impulse (2003)

Emerging from the late-'70s downtown New York City music scene, Chance was a maverick among outsiders. A conservatory-trained saxophonist, he bent punk into strange shapes by tightening it up with a funky beat, then scrawling free-blowing graffiti all over the place. The first of four albums collected here, 1979's Buy the Contortions, is where Ornette Coleman fans found common ground with pogoing scenesters and is a prime document of punk version 1.0. Throughout the rest of this boxed set, the template rarely wavers but the fun never wanes.