Being a wild card comes naturally

Yet the band, which plays T.T. the Bear’s Place on Sunday, is quickly making a name for itself by thriving out of place. Though rooted in the township music of their homeland and enamored of the cavernous sound of dub reggae, the band is most aptly described as a new kind of prog rock - ambitious, chaotic, and aggressively proficient on bass, drums, and guitars.

The band members, who include childhood friends Lindani Buthelezi and Mpumi Mcata, both guitarists, and bassist Molefi Makananise, share a craving for all sorts of music, said percussionist Tshepang Ramoba. At home in Johannesburg, mainstream rap - Jay-Z, for instance - is at least as prevalent as traditional South African music, he explained, to the exclusion of other styles.

He often wonders why his peers aren’t more musically adventurous, Ramoba said on speaker phone with Buthelezi from New York, where the band recently kicked off its American tour.

“Don’t tell me there isn’t one R&B song or one reggae song you like,’’ he said. “If you’re open, everything will be clear to you. But they don’t play a lot of Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd on African radio, so they don’t know about it.’’

Omnivorous in their tastes, the members of BLK JKS (pronounced “Black Jacks’’) mix them up into a defiantly busy sound. To them, it’s only natural.

“Real life is like clay,’’ said Buthelezi, the band’s frontman, whose moody croon is featured in the band’s more contemplative moments on its first album, “After Robots.’’ “It can be molded in different ways - hence the music.’’

That such lofty rock music should seem unusual coming from an African band only amuses the musicians.

“People think Africa is just animals and trees,’’ said Ramoba. “They don’t know we have cities.’’

The album was recorded in Bloomington, Ind., home of the band’s independent record label, Secretly Canadian, with producer Brandon Curtis of Secret Machines. Curtis also produced an introductory release that came out a year ago. The four-song “Mystery’’ EP (which included the ghostly signature song “Lakeside’’) was recorded at New York’s historic Electric Lady Studios, built for Jimi Hendrix.

“There were two pianos, one black and one white,’’ Ramoba recalled. “I went straight to the white one.’’ Told the piano was off-limits - it was actually Hendrix’s - he was eventually permitted to keep playing, whereupon a new song emerged as if by divine intervention.

The band, established in 2000, spent years carting around South Africa playing prisons, soccer fields, and other makeshift venues. Though BLK JKS have a brief recording history to date, they have more than 50 songs in their arsenal, Ramoba says. What sometimes sounds like inspired improvisation on their recordings is actually the product of long hours of calculation, according to Buthelezi.

They wrote brass parts for “After Robots’’ on piano and taught them to a group of students on loan from the Indiana University marching band, who recorded scratch versions. The final horn tracks were recorded by the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, members of whom BLK JKS met while the ensemble was funking up a New York subway station.

Though the band has already attracted some notable admirers (Bono was said to be en route to their New York tour opener, though they never learned whether he actually showed up), the musical underground seems a likely long-term home for this heady foursome. It’s not such a strange place after all.

Upon first arriving in New York, “I thought everything was fake,’’ Ramoba said with a laugh. “When I saw trees, I thought maybe they just made them up. But we got used to it. We saw that it was not different from Johannesburg. And Brooklyn has the same feeling as Soweto, so it was kind of easy to merge. As they say, if you grow up in Johannesburg, you can survive anywhere else in the world.’’