SOUNDS OF SOUTH AFRICA
Ladysmith Black Mambazo is back at Steppenwolf for the project “Lindiwe.”
In the summer of 1984, even as Nelson Mandela remained incarcerated in Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison, the singer-songwriter Paul Simon hit play on a cassette tape and became enamored with the “township jive” (or “Jaiva”) music that was seeping out from the impoverished black townships of Apartheid-era South Africa.
Simon was long broken up with Art Garfunkel, suffering a lull in his solo career and looking for a new creative identity. At the time, he said the sound on that cassette reminded him of 1950s rhythm and blues, which he loved, and that he suddenly found himself unconsciously “scatsinging melodies over the tracks.”
So Simon headed to Johannesburg that summer, looking (not unlike David Byrne and David Bowie around the same time) for collaborators who might help him incorporate what became bizarrely known as “world beat” into his music.
His was not an excursion without controversy: Apartheid South Africa still was subject to a long-standing cultural boycott. But Simon went, arguing he could better help South African musicians by doing so person to person, paycheck to paycheck. Hanging out with potential groups, Simon happened upon a friendly man named Joseph Shabalala, a farm boy-turned-factory worker who had become the leader of a vocal choir named Ladysmith Black Mambazo, made up mostly of friends and family. The idea for the group, he said, had come to him in a dream.
Had Simon not made that trip, which brought global fame to Shabalala’s vision, it is inconceivable that two of Shabalala’s four sons, Thulani and Sibongiseni, would have been sitting, 35 years later, in a rehearsal room in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, preparing “Lindiwe,” an all-new artistic collaboration between Ladysmith Black Mambazo and the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, a project they said had been blessed by their now-retired, 78-year-old father.
“Paul Simon,” Thulani Shabalala says, remembering the day when he had first showed up at their home, “opened the gates to the world. There was no color in that guy. He was just full of music.”
And, through various convoluted and winding circumstances, the opened gate led to Chicago and its famed Steppenwolf Theatre. It is a fascinating story.
The global gates opened because Simon worked with Mambazo on two of the tracks within would become one of Simon’s most successful albums, “Graceland,” a Grammy Award-winning critical hit reported to have sold 16 million copies worldwide after its 1986 release and widely reputed to be among the best albums of all time.
The tracks were “Homeless” (adapted from a Zulu wedding song) and the more famous and commercially successful “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes,” which Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo performed together on a 1986 episode of “Saturday Night Live,” following their introduction by Robin Williams. It became one of the most famous musical performances in the show’s history.
The combination of “Graceland” and “Saturday Night Live” made Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and their joyful performative demeanor, world famous.
Simon was not done with Ladysmith Black Mambazo: He produced the group’s next album, they went on tour together and the group’s fame was further solidified.
Mambazo appeared in “Moonwalker,” Michael Jackson’s movie, and they sang the opening sequence for Eddie Murphy’s “Coming to America.” They did commercials for Heinz soup and ketchup, they worked with Dolly Parton, and when Mandela, who was released from prison in 1990, became president of South Africa in 1994, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, now the branded global sound of black South Africa, sang at his inauguration.
Three years earlier, though, a neophyte playwright named Tug Yourgrau (a white American who had lived the first 10 years of his life in South Africa), had submitted his first play to an open Steppenwolf contest searching for new scripts. Those were the days before the current pipeline of writers with Ivy League MFAs and powerful agents — Steppenwolf then was casting its net wide for new work and was open to a guy who had, basically, 10 pages and an interesting idea. It was called “The Song of Jacob Zulu.”
“Jacob Zulu” was the somber story of a 19-year-old black South African who blew up a shopping mall near Durban and later was hanged for murdering five people. The man was Jacob Zondo, who happened to be the cousin of Joseph Shabalala.
Yourgrau (who is now a TV producer) was a fan of Mambazo, and after hearing that Steppenwolf wanted to produce his play, he sent a speculative note to the group’s record label, asking if they would participate. Shabalala liked the idea and, after he realized that he was related to the subject, his interest grew.
In fact, Zondo’s story would become just one entry in a lexicon of tragedy that befell the members of Mambazo over the years, even as their fame grew. In 1991, Shabalala’s brother and one of the members in the group, Headman Shabalala, was shot and killed by an off-duty security guard. And in June 2004, Joseph’s brother Ben Shabalala, a member of the group who had retired in 1993 in the wake of the Headman incident, would himself be shot and killed in a Durban suburb.
So in 1992, Joseph Shabalala said yes to Yourgrau. And thus Mambazo collaborated with Steppenwolf on a project helmed by a young associate artistic director named Eric Simonson (who would make a useful connection with a musical superstar and go on to work on a separate and ill-fated Paul Simon-scored Broadway show called “The Capeman”).
“The group had never done theater,” Simonson recalls of the start of the “Jacob Zulu” process. “So it was a steep learning curve. But we could still feel we had something special and they signed on to do the play.”
This was relatively soon after “Graceland.” Steppenwolf, and Chicago as a whole, was thrilled by the prospect of “The Song of Jacob Zulu.” Shabalala, a celebrity, came to Chicago to work on the project and even sat for an interview with Studs Terkel.
“This is a play about the victims for whom the good news of the ending of apartheid comes too late,” Shabalala told the Tribune’s Sid Smith, explaining that his group was functioning as a kind of Greek chorus. And when the group sings, “This is the song of those for whom the end of apartheid comes too late,” Joseph Shabalala told Edward Lifson of National Public Radio, he would cry, remembering what had happened to his brother the previous December.
Smith, who went on to review the show, had issues with the script but not with the group performing: “Though male and mostly middle-aged,” he wrote, ecstatically, “they are a choir of angels, makers of mellifluous, creamy, high-pitched tones that transcendently send listeners to aural lands of celestial harmony and wonder.”
“As ‘The Song of Jacob Zulu’ is spun out through a seamless interweaving of flashbacks, dreams, trial scenes and choral interludes,” wrote Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times, in a review that was too quickly forgotten as Steppenwolf attacked the critic years later, “the psychic poison that has oozed out of South Africa’s racist system of apartheid is poured slowly but unrelentingly into our consciousness.”
That spring, Paul Simon showed up for a fundraiser organized by Steppenwolf for the family of Headman Shabalala. Oprah Winfrey was there too, even joining everyone on stage for a song. She’d already donated $50,000 to the production.
Simonson, his career advanced, was profiled in the Chicago Tribune Sunday magazine.
Enough enthusiasm, then, for Broadway? Yes, and no. After various dances with the Shuberts, Steppenwolf ended up producing the $4.1 million Broadway production itself, even creating a for-profit company, known as the New Works Corp, to produce the show.
But there was major controversy: Several furious playwrights from the Dramatist’s Guild spoke to the press alleging that a naive Yourgrau had been “bullied” into accepting a flat fee for his work, at least until the costs had been recouped, violating the usual terms. Steppenwolf said it had no choice, but it was a strike against the project.
Worse, the New York reviews for “Jacob Zulu” were much less kind than in Chicago.
“What emerges is a workmanlike courtroom drama that sinks under its relentlessly straightforward telling of the title character’s tragic story,” wrote the Associated Press. “When the group is not in full cry,” wrote Frank Rich in the New York Times, “‘Jacob Zulu’ often settles for an earthbound earnestness that will be most easily embraced by those who don’t mind some boredom in pursuit of a good cause.”
Boring was not a boffo emotion. The show closed after 64 performances, losing its entire capitalization, even though Tony nominations followed.
“We were simply unable to keep the necessary momentum alive,” Steve Eich, Steppenwolf ’s then-managing director told Weiss. “Whether it was a question of the economy, the fickleness of New York audiences or a matter of saturation with the whole issue of oppression in South Africa, I cannot tell.”
But Steppenwolf and Ladysmith wanted to work again — and, by 1995 Simonson had come up with a project called “Nomathemba (Hope),” the story of a woman who leaves her home and family in an attempt to find happiness in the big city, only to realize she had left it back at home. Once again, Shabalala came to Chicago with his group. Simonson was again directing, and the script, based on a Shabalala song, had been created in collaboration with the writer Ntozake Shange.
Tribune critic Richard Christiansen loved the piece. “At the deep, singing heart of Steppenwolf Theatre’s beautiful and deeply moving production of ‘Nomathemba,’ ” he wrote, “is that fragile and precious element of life called hope. It is hope hemmed in by tragedy and uncertainty, set in a changing South Africa, but it is hope nonetheless, and in the end it is triumphant.”
The show moved to the Kennedy Center in Washington and was well received. But it did not play on Broadway. And Steppenwolf, which was now under the artistic direction of Martha Lavey, didn’t try to raise its own money again for a New York production.
“Nomathemba (Hope)” was the last theatrical project in which Ladysmith Black Mambazo participated, although its touring schedule remains extensive. The Shabalala brothers say that various offers have come to them but have been too hard to work out. Until now.
Many of the older members of Ladysmith Black Mambazo have been replaced by younger men and are now in Chicago for the first time, but the sound is still the same. And at this rehearsal the group is able, as always, to start singing as if it were a single organism. There is no need for a conductor or even for the members of the group to look at each other.
“It comes from being together,” Sibongiseni Shabalala says.
For “Lindiwe,” which has been in gestation since the late Martha Lavey was the artistic director of the company, Simonson is back at the table, working with Jonathan Berry, one of the many new people in the artistic office at the storied theater company. Simonson said that when Lavey left the company, this was the project she had most wanted to see happen.
“Lindiwe” is an original script, written by Simonson, with music credited to Mambazo. The group was, in fact, still writing the music, during the rehearsal.
The piece was conceived as a love story set in both Chicago and South Africa and it stars the South African actress-singer Nondumiso Tembe, who says she has been working with Ladysmith to help create a sound that would make sense for a young, contemporary woman to sing.
The idea, Simonson said, is to connect the Chicago blues with the kind of music that Mambazo made famous. In recent nights, the members of the group had been hanging out at the blues club Kingston Mines — incognito, they said. They’ve been experimenting with fusing blues into their new compositions.
“The blues are different from the music we do in South Africa,” Sibongiseni Shabalala says. “But I like it.”
So, across the years and generations, there is a clear connection between “Lindiwe” and the Graceland album that changed the history of the group and, arguably, did more to expose South African music to the mainstream than any other recording.
The brothers talk a lot about teaching the young generation about the Mambazo history and, maybe, updating their sound just a little. For Mambazo, which has often collaborated with white artists, “Lindiwe” is an interesting experiment but also part of its ongoing mission to bring hope for peace and reconciliation.
“I really felt this was a way for all of us, Steppenwolf and Mambazo, to embrace one another,” Simonson says, “to look back at what we have lost and what we still have.”
“Lindewe” runs Nov. 7 to Jan. 5 at Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St.; 312-335-1650 and www .steppenwolf.org