Post-punk's rhythm man Jah Wobble invades Underground Arts

If any musician / composer could lay claim to a been-there-done-that badge, it's Jah Wobble. An old friend of Johnny Rotten, Wobble cofounded Public Image Ltd. when his singer pal left the Sex Pistols. Together, Rotten (now going by his real name, John Lydon) and Wobble (born John Joseph Wardle) crafted a hauntingly atmospheric ensemble, with the latter creating the rhythm of post-punk with the dub-reggae-infused pulse that filled albums such as

Public Image

and

Metal Box / First Edition

.

Wobble's bass lines were as aggressive as they were laconic, as harsh as they were balming. "Remember, Jamaica can be a very violent place and reggae a very violent music," Wobble said recently about turning dub's chill into a throbbing, frightening bottom. "The London I grew up in wasn't pretty, but that's how I came to reggae, in the skinhead era, when it was on the radio, or outside the local tube station playing on the speakers."

Of punk, Wobble thinks very little. It was, in his mind, "something that really only lasted for nine months in the summer of 1976. It was like that John Hughes film The Breakfast Club - you had all these marginal people who were definitely not the captain of the football team or their cheerleaders. Too much is made of that moment."

Wobble laughed as he said, "If you want to be rebellious now, you either write scripts for HBO or cook. Cooking is more rock-and-roll than music."

The spicy, flavorful stew that Wobble continued to make after he parted from Public Image Ltd. was filled with collaborations: Brian Eno, with Wobble's becoming the only man to actually produce that producer's work; U2's The Edge; Primal Scream; Can's Jaki Liebezeit; and Holger Czukay.

Wobble's spiky solo career is even more intriguing, with albums such as 1990's Without Judgement, 1991's Rising Above Bedlam, and 1994's Take Me to God (with his genre-blending Invaders of the Heart ensemble) that sample diverse tones from China, the Middle East, West London, and North Africa.

A jocular Wobble offered a gorgeous familial geography of sources for the babbling sound in his head, the last of them his Chinese-born, guzheng-player wife, Zi Lan Liao.

"She's a lucky woman," he said, teasing. "There were fife and drum players in my family, so I think that's the rhythm in me. My mum was Irish. My dad, too, but he traveled with the army until he got traumatized during World War II. When he got home, he would shut himself in a dark room and play piano - German composers, Beethoven, jazz. Totally untrained. That's my DNA. "Plus, folk, The Who's Quadrophenia, Stevie Wonder, and a ton of American black music.

"I love the Sound of Philadelphia. That really grabbed me, all that brass and strings," he said, not realizing he was talking to a Philadelphia publication.

All this brings him, and us, to his new solo album, Everything Is Nothing, and his first American tour in decades, stopping Thursday at Underground Arts. The inspiration is, in part, the lush, silvery sound of Miles Davis in his post-bop, early-to-mid-60s period working with studio whiz Teo Macero.

"That's funny you mention Macero, as there's so many roads he could have gone down when producing Miles - he was the man," Wobble said about the modal music he has crafted on Everything Is Nothing and its connection to the jazz giants. "A lot of this new album comes from the whole rearranging of backing tracks, which was Teo's bag.

"With me and / or my Invaders of the Heart, there's that jazz, but there's those broader vistas - an Eastern thing, that world beat thing as well. And then you've got to go even more subgenre, so that's what it is that I do: a subgenre revue instead of like an old-soul revue. Yeah."

Jah Wobble's Invaders of the Heart play at 9 p.m. Thursday at Underground Arts, 1200 Callowhill St., $25-$28, 215-627-1332, undergroundarts.org.