by Clarence Tsui
Jah Wobble has packed more into the last 20-odd years
than most wannabes could even dream about The legendary bassist’s
biography is more like fiction. He got his first bass from Sid Vicious and
went on to help John Lydon find musical enlightenment with Public Image
Limited. Then, at 23, he worked with Jaki Liebezeit of the German
experimental rock band Can. By the time he had reached his mid-20s, he was
so exasperated with all the showbiz shenanigans that he went underground.
No, he didn't go all subversive. He literally went underground, driving
trains and sweeping platforms on London’s subway system. It was a retreat
of a kind and an odd one, but it obviously did wonders: When Wobble
eventually emerged into daylight -
and the limelight - he was firing on all musical
cylinders and working on trail-blazing projects with musicians from
distant lands.
His works since then have been many and varied. He’s set William Blake
verses and Irish poetry to music; created mesmerising trance music that
drives people to meditation rather than
madness; produced Brian Eno’s soundtrack for Derek
Jarman’s last film; remixed
Portuguese folk guitar collective Madredeus; and
co-written one of Bjork's top 10 hits, "Play
Dead”. Back at home there is even more
music-making with his Chinese wife, Zi Lan Liao, a
talented player of Cheng, the Chinese zither.
With Passage On Hades,
Wobble is on new ground again using the minimal rhythms of saxophonist
Evan Parker. The circularity of Parker’s reeds go down well with Wobble’s
crew including Clive Bell on flute and Jean-Pierre Rasle on the bagpipes.
An uncertain mix surely? No, it is an exciting one of contemporary but
atonal sounds, Wobble assures tells iMag
from his
office in London
How
did Passage On Hades
come about?
I knew what Evan Parker had been playing and I had seen him perform a few
times. What I really liked about his playing was his circular breathing
- very powerful and fast.
I felt it would work very well with my style of bass-playing with this new
group I have, Deep Space. The record is simple .. we recorded and mixed
the album in one day. Deep Space plays very repetitious trance music - I
just felt it would be good to get Evan to play on top of it.
What connects Evan with you?
Evan is very open. One of the things I like about Evan’s
playing is that it reminds me very much of Moroccan pipe music. I just
felt we could bring that out. Evan has that same kind of obsessional
quality as Jaki Liebezeit: he is Western but he has something that is
Eastern, like an Eastern master of his art. With those people, they are
very open - there isn’t really anything Eastern or Western about it. Evan
doesn’t do fruity kinds of things that typical city saxophonists do -
he doesn’t do fake John Coltrane tricks.
How do
you choose who to collaborate
with?
I’m a very lazy person —
so I like to work with people who aren’t painful. I don’t
like to stay in studios for two months and then things don’t work out. I’m
looking for people who can stand still and meditate together.
Many artists have been ridiculed for adding a tending to be “exotic”. How do you steer clear of that?
You have to work from the root up, you have to to work rhythmically as much as anything. It really becomes a problem when people make a house beat — a very mathematical one, when it’s naturally a square beat— and then try and put other instruments on top. It’s very crude. When I work with a sitar — someone who has practised for years and sacrificed a lot - I must be respectful to him and the instrument I must try and make a comfortable place with my bass-playing. Unfortunately, increasingly, when you talk to all these 20-year-old would-be producers and you mention respect you might lust as well be talking in a language from another universe.
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What was the watershed that led you from thrashing punk in the Public Image Limited to ethnomusic?
I think I became more useful when I stopped drinking and taking drugs. No, seriously — I am another one of those boring people in the music industry. When I stopped drinking and taking drugs I was able to utilise my time better. That’s the greatest thing that happened in my life without a doubt. I was always learning, and slowly joining the dots up — until suddenly the picture began to appear. I think it’s difficult to give an exact point, it’s like asking where do the deserts end and mountains begin. It’s a gradual dawning. |
Do you think those PIL days
contributed to your current musical direction?
Oh very much, absolutely. I
basically played the same
form of bass then that I do now. It’s got that kind of darkness in
between major and minor. I remember I was very surprised when we
went to America and quite a few leftfield jazz musicians came to see
us. Keith Levene [of PIL] is a terrible person, I think, but
as a musician, he's a fantastic guitar player. The harmonics we were
using were quite sophisticated. Externally, the instrumentation is
very different - we weren't using sitars, Chengs or brass sections -
but the core was the same.
Everything is going better now records on your own labels, isn’t
it?' Exactly, it’s fantastic to be able
to just do the Evan Parker record and not
have to go to record
companies to explain who Evan Parker is. Or
some record company
executive in New York would
come and go: “Yeah’ you've
got to put a dance beat to it”. By having my own label,
I don't have to get involved in this - I just release the record.
All of this would not have happened if you hadn’t
gwen
up your job on the London Underground, would it?
No, but sometimes I miss
it. Sometimes a
regular job is fantastic: you can switch off, read the newspaper and eat your tea. But that’s a long time gone.
But you don’t get to meet Laotian musicians working
on the
Tube.
I
don’t
know,
actually, because there are buskers down
there.
You
never
know. I’ve worked on
it
and I saw all kinds of musicians down there
Molam Dub
was definitely not born on the Northern Line, was it? How did it come about?
I’ve heard music from Laos, especially the Molam form of music (which is the Laotian answer to Chinese “mountain songs”, where male and female vocalists engage in bawdy and amorous duels).
When I heard that I just said, this is insane, because some of the bass-playing
there reminds me very much of myself. I thought I must play with these people,
but since Laos is not one of the old British colonies there weren’t that many
Laotians here in this country. A few years passed and I was very close to going
to Laos with two of my musicians just to record people there. Then we heard of the Laotian musicians in Paris. It was a marriage made in heaven — it was the easiest record I ever made and there was this fantastic atmosphere in the studio.
How about Five Tone Dragon, the record with Chinese influences which thrust Mrs Wobble into centre stage?
That was a different piece. We were commissioned to write a piece for the Liverpool Philharmonic and I thought, as we live together, maybe we might write a piece together. And it’s pentatonic, which is something I love because my basslines are usually pentatonic. It’s a very different project to Molam or to [the record with] Evan Parker because it was composed for a Western orchestra, kind of a concerto featuring Eastern pentatonic instruments. That was a good challenge. Zi Lan is a very good musician. But the only time we argue is when we work together so we said, it’s great, we were very happy about the record but let’s leave it for another two years.
Passage To Hades is expected in Hong Kong on import soon. All of Wobble’s work is available on his own website, www.3Ohertzrecords. corn
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