Jah Wobble
I Could Have Been A Contender

There are musicians who, without much fuss (or clamor), have been influencing the more or less alternative scene for decades: one of these is certainly Jah Wobble, a tremendous bassist endowed with great technique and even more originality and inventiveness who has authoritatively presided over the crossroads between dub, ambient, wave, avant-garde, and easy listening since as far back as 1978.

I Could Have Been A Contender is an anthology of no less than three discs for the price of one, with which Trojan celebrates the career of this pretty boy from Stepney.

It starts with the P.I.L. and their paranoid post-punk architectures: here are included Public Image, Swan Lake, and especially the marvelous Poptones. The compositional contribution of our protagonist is easily discernible, just listen to the bass that frames all three songs in a claustrophobic and pumped-up manner (many critics think that good Lydon kicked Wobble out of P.I.L. because he was stealing space and recognition, but these are just gossips)...

Next comes one of his first solo experiments: Betrayal Dub, gaudy and cute but still tied to a strongly wave song form. Extremely interesting are his works with Holgar Czuckay of the Can: How Much Are They and Snake Charmer (with an unprecedented The Edge on guitar and the sumptuous production of the historical Franco-New York DJ Kevorkian) are baroque experiments between dub and edgy kraut arrangements that reach peaks of proto-urban dance.

A separate chapter should be devoted to the pieces with the Invaders Of The Heart: a combo of which Jah has always been the soul and heart and with which he crossed Jamaican, jazzy, pop, and world music to create an intriguing oriental-tinged downtempo in times still virgin to this kind of sound.

His career has continued to this day, meeting that of many other alien and alienating characters, musically speaking: the ambient-dub experiment of '95 with Brian Eno (from which Spinner and Left Where It Fell are drawn), the intelligent attempt to unite Jamaican reverberations with jazz through collaborations with Pharoa Sanders and Evan Parker and (last but not least) the 1996 dub-reading tribute to William Blake. All collaborations and works to remember and for which we will never be grateful enough to this genius (and to Trojan for having extraordinarily collected them).