Damian Marley is the son of reggae great Bob Marley.

AP / JIM COOPER

It’s been three years since Damian Marley’s third album, Welcome to Jamrock, put the youngest son of reggae legend Bob Marley on the musical map with dance-floor slammers such as the title track and “Move!”. Since then, the 30-year-old has been working on new music, but as usual his career has been a family affair.

Marley says he is working on a new record now and has been helping his brother Stephen on the recording and touring for his latest record, last year’s Mind Control. Brother Julian is working on a new record as well, and the brothers are also working with the young Jamaican artist Javaughn Bond, whose debut album Superstar was released last year.

The family has studios in Miami and Jamaica, and basically the Marley family works on music together, with the songwriting determining whose album it actually is. “We’re always all there together,” Damian Marley says, “and naturally as musicians, we all take part in whatever’s going on. . . . Each person has their own expression. But it’s a group effort in that everyone is involved somewhere.”

Welcome to Jamrock was a mix of reggae and hip-hop influences that was relatively new, and somewhat controversial, when it hit, but is commonplace now. Marley says that collaborations between the two genres are happening all over the place, and to him it seems perfectly natural.

“I think those genres of music are very similar. Hip-hop historians attribute reggae music as one of the birth elements of hip-hop. For example, Kool Herc is a Jamaican who brought the Jamaican culture of speaking over the turntables, and that whole ’70s dancehall style of doing things — he brought that to America, and that was the birth of hip-hop music.

“And both genres of music express street people’s thoughts, visions, dreams, whatever the case may be. It’s the outlet for that street expression. So I think they are different branches of the same tree.”

He takes a similar tack when it comes to the division between roots reggae — the basic, vintage form, played with rock instruments and popularized by his father —– and dancehall, which we now think of as a keyboard and drum machine-driven, modern sound. Jamrock took elements of both, and Marley says that in Jamaica the lines aren’t as sharply drawn as American fans and the music industry like to make them.

“The truth is, the majority of Jamaican artists over the years mingle with both. You seldom find artists who only do fast dancehall and have never been on a traditional reggae track. And I always have to point out that the dancehall was a place. So what we call today cultural, or authentic, reggae, in the ’70s was dancehall. Because it was being played in the dancehalls! So it’s like R&B to hip-hop, where it’s not too far apart. It’s part of the same culture — Jamaican culture.”

Bob Marley died in 1981, when Damian was 2 years old, so he never got to know his father in the traditional sense. But thanks to the records, the stories, the legends and even the video footage, Bob Marley is still a presence in his life.

“I barely got to know him in the flesh because of my age, it’s true, but I know a lot of him. . . . And you see it in your brothers also.”

Did he ever consider not making music for his life’s work?

“I’d say I had a couple of thoughts, but they were just thoughts,” Damian Marley says, adding that he did well in technical drawing in school. “But really, I have a serious love for music, not just because of me being a Marley, though I guess that’s opened up a lot of avenues for me.

“But my father has not been the only person who has been a big musical influence on my life. . . . We have people in Jamaica like Shabba Ranks and Supercat, who were big dancehall artists in Jamaica, who when I was growing up were some of the first music I bought for myself,” says Marley, who started his first band at age 13.

The family legacy is one he accepts gratefully.

“The world knows so much of my father. And what he gave to the world is still very much alive, where people can experience it and get to know him. So in that sense I’d say I know him. And really, that’s an ideal legacy. I look up to my father first and foremost as my father, and also as the great humanitarian that the world has come to embrace him as.”

Damian and Stephen Marley play on the Fort Stage on Saturday.

rmassimo@projo.com