BUTLER TRANSCENDS GAP

“When you’re from South Africa, people expect you to sing in Zulu and play ‘home style’ music,” said a shrugging Jonathan Butler, who is from South Africa but doesn’t sing in Zulu or play “home style” (i.e. tribal-based) music.

Butler--who was born in a Cape Town shantytown but has lived in London since 1985--specializes in a Westernized brand of romantic pop/jazz influenced by Al Jarreau and George Benson--both of whom have recorded this singer-songwriter-guitarist’s material.

This accessible style explains why Butler may have an easier time getting radio air play in this country than more traditional, roots-oriented South African artists like Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the 10-member a cappella group that toured recently with Paul Simon.

Indeed, Butler’s single, “Lies”--a jazz-flavored track from his just-released Jive Records album--has already cracked the Top 10 on Billboard magazine’s black music chart, and it looks as if it’s ready to cross over after moving to No. 53 on the pop chart.

Even back in South Africa, Butler enjoys a much wider following than a group like Ladysmith. Butler--in town on a promotional visit for his new double album, “Jonathan Butler”--seemed embarrassed when asked to compare their popularity in that country. “Well, I am a household name there, whereas there are people in South Africa who have never even heard of Ladysmith,” he said at his hotel in Beverly Hills.

A handsome man with a close-cropped hair style, Butler, 25, attributes that popularity gap to the fact that “traditional ethnic” music--like that of Ladysmith--rarely received radio play in South Africa until Simon’s Grammy-winning “Graceland” album created an interest in it.

Due to his more Westernized style, Butler performed before both black and white audiences in a traveling variety show he joined at the age of 6.

Riding in caravans to Libya, Angola and Zimbabwe (“where we were stripped, searched and put through many humiliating situations”), Butler had become a Michael Jackson-style teen idol by the time he was 13.

His early records, mostly remakes of American pop standards by the Drifters (“Please Stay”) and the Paris Sisters (“I Love How You Love Me”), were played on South Africa’s seven major radio stations. He was also the first black person to win a SARY Award, South Africa’s equivalent to the Grammy.

Despite his star status and popularity, the diminutive, quiet-spoken artist acknowledged that he was “still unable to go certain places because I’m black.”

Butler, who describes himself as a born-again Christian, admitted that he once “hated whites” and couldn’t understand some of the meeker attitudes of his parents’ generation: “But now I can love and appreciate what they went through so that I might one day sit here in a hotel, while drinking a Coke, and discuss my music.”

When asked, though, why the message of his music isn’t political in tone, he said, “I wouldn’t do it unless I woke up one morning with something in my heart that had to be expressed. I can’t write something just to say ‘Look America, this is how much they hurt me.’ I look at Stevie Wonder’s music as the perfect balance of the heart and politics. But not even Stevie Wonder discusses politics all the time.”

Songs of Butler’s that do reflect his Africanism are jazzy, tribal-colored instrumentals such as “Going Home,” from his current album, and “Afrika” and “Crossroads Revisited” from his well-received debut album of last year, “Introducing Jonathan Butler.”

He added, “Whether I settle down for good in England or America, I will always be African. It will never feel natural for me to go ‘Yo, brother!’ I come from South Africa. I can never lose that perspective.”