Dave and Phil Alvin blast into World Café Live

In the 1980s, Dave and Phil Alvin played together in the Blasters, the great California band that masterfully mixed vernacular music styles with wildcat rock-and-roll energy.

The title cut of the group's 1980 debut album, American Music, laid out a mission statement that the Blasters delivered with a fervor that fit right in with acts, such as X and Black Flag, that the Alvins used to share stages with in the Los Angeles punk scene.

"We got the Louisiana boogie and the Delta blues, we got country, swing and rockabilly, too," Phil sang, at breakneck speed. "We got jazz, country-western and Chicago blues / It's the greatest music that you ever knew."

The original core Blasters lineup made four studio albums, the last being the John Cougar Mellencamp-produced Hard Line in 1985. They won over an ardent fan base, but never attained widespread popularity. And even among famously squabbling brother acts like the Kinks and Oasis, the Blasters' creative setup made longevity unlikely. Older brother Phil, a commanding vocalist with a parallel academic career in mathematics, sang the songs. But Dave, a thrilling guitarist with a flair for storytelling, wrote them.

In 1986, Dave left the band.

"We were on different paths," says Dave Alvin, 58, talking in March at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. He and his older brother were there to unveil Common Ground: Dave & Phil Alvin Play and Sing the Songs of Big Bill Broonzy nolead begins (***) nolead ends , their spirited tribute to the bluesman who was their boyhood musical hero.

Thursday night, they'll support that album - the first they've recorded together in nearly 30 years - at World Cafe Live with Dave's band the Guilty Ones behind them.

"It would have been hell to be my little brother, especially as skilled as he is," Phil Alvin says.

"I've always said, 'You know, if Bob Dylan had Phil for a brother, there'd be no Bob Dylan records,' " says Dave. "There'd be Phil Dylan records."

After Dave left, Phil resumed graduate work in math, teaching calculus at California State Long Beach, and working in the field of non-well-founded set theory which, when he starts to explain it, makes a layman's brain hurt.

Standing on the deck of an Austin chicken shack, he has a Pythagoras quote on the relationship between music and math: "There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres."

Phil released a pair of solo albums, including the 1986 classic Un Sung Stories, which featured support from Philadelphia's Sun Ra Arkestra. He also toured with the Blasters, putting his stamp on his brother's gritty songs.

One of the best of those, "4th of July," is a world-weary summer classic that there's a good chance you've heard on the radio this month. And Dave has released a dozen albums of consistent quality, developing into an ever more effective vocalist, to go with sterling six-string and songwriting skills.

The brothers say there was no real animosity. "We're brothers," Dave says. "And the thing about the Blasters was, we all grew up together [southeast of L.A. in Downey, Calif.]. Everybody fought."

The Alvins played occasional Blasters reunion shows over the years, but weren't in a hurry to record again. "Going into the studio is a whole other ball game," Dave says.

But time brought them back together.

"We've lost a lot of family members, and we've lost a lot of friends," Dave said. "And then Phil was very ill and died in Spain and was brought back to life."

Died? Actually died?

"It's true," the elder Alvin says, recalling when, in 2012, an infection from a tooth abscess caused his throat to swell and heart to stop. He later sang "Maria, Maria," a Spanish version of the Blasters' "Marie, Marie," to Mariella Anaya Sifuentes, the physician who brought him back.

Dave wrote "What's Up With Your Brother?" for his 2011 album Eleven Eleven, and invited Phil to sing on it. It addresses the question they've been asked for three decades, and comes to a conclusion: "Blood is thicker than water."

Last year, the duo played squabbling siblings in Mellencamp's musical theater piece Ghost Brothers of Darkland County. Then Dave called Phil with the idea to record an EP of songs by Broonzy, the Mississippi bluesman known for "Key to the Highway" who died in 1958.

Why Big Bill?

One day in the mid-1960s, their mother took Phil along to a Downey department store. He found an LP called Big Bill's Blues.

"I didn't know who he was, but the cover was so cool," he recalls.

"He was in a suit, with a fedora," Dave says. "Smiling but not smiling. An all-knowing Buddhist smile."

The Alvins had heard Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, and would later hang out with Big Joe Turner and T-Bone Walker. But there was something special about Broonzy.

"He had that thing, that charisma," Dave says. "If he would have died in 1933, he would be worshipped by blues purists. But he went on to have a legitimate 30-year career."

The brothers originally planned to cut a handful of Broonzy songs, but it quickly grew into a full-length CD, chugging on the low-down "You've Changed," flying on the fingerpicked "Saturday Night Rub."

"I thought, 'If Phil and I ever make a record together, we better make it now,' " says Dave, who doesn't rule out the possibility of doing a future record with the Blasters.

For this fresh start, though, he wanted to keep it simple. "Let's go to the day that he brought back the record from the store, and start there. Let's just go to square one."

Dave and Phil Alvin and the Guilty Ones

With Jonah Tolchin and the Lonesome Angels at 8 p.m. Thursday at World Cafe Live, 3025 Walnut St.

Tickets: $20-$30. Information: 215-222-1400 or www.worldcafelive.com

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