Ladysmith Makes a Dream Come True : New Album Catches the Spirit of Musical Vision, Shabalala Says

Joseph Shabalala stood on a North Hollywood rehearsal stage earlier this week fine-tuning the 10 voices of Ladysmith Black Mambazo for an American tour that opens tonight at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano.

Those who have heard the South African group’s contributions to Paul Simon’s “Graceland” album might consider their deep, rich harmonies already to be as close to perfection as things get, but a dissatisfied Shabalala ran the singers over the same ground again and again, smoothing out nearly imperceptible fluctuations in the harmony lines.

“Reveal yourself, reveal yourself” the singers repeated, on the chorus of “King of Kings,” a hymn the group sings in English rather than its native Zulu tongue. By the time Shabalala was pleased, the chorused voices stood as distinct and palpable as redwoods, with Shabalala’s pleading tenor gliding bird-like between them. He grinned, and his eyes fixed upward, seemingly incognizant of the ceiling separating him from the sky.

During a break, Shabalala bolted down a Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner box--”We have this in South Africa. I think it is everywhere”--then sat for an interview. All relatives of Shabalala, the rest of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, which also plays Wednesday at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, relaxed in the studio lounge, laughing over a “CHiPS.” rerun.

The exposure the group received through “Graceland” and a seven-month tour last year with Simon has brought them far. They perform now on “The Tonight Show” and in concert halls from Germany to New Zealand instead of in the dirt-floor meeting halls and churches of South African townships they had been accustomed to.

“Shaka Zulu,” the group’s first album for a major American label--it has 27 discs out in South Africa--has sold more than 250,000 copies worldwide since it was released last year. The album also earned a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Recording. Coming from a land where one of Shabalala’s fellow musicians is famous simply for having once flown in an airplane, it is a stunning success.

Although their new audiences understand few of the words and the settings have changed, Shabalala says the music hasn’t. “I do the same thing here that I do with my people. There are many musics here in the world, but I like to keep my own. It’s the only music I know.” The style of singing is based on a traditional Zulu male vocal form called Isicathamiya , which translates as “to walk on one’s toes, lightly.”

Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s new album is “Journey of Dreams,” which aptly describes Shabalala and the group’s musical progress. A native of Ladysmith, a farming town 200 miles from the port city of Durban, the 47-year-old bandleader recalls singing with childhood friends in a community hut, competing for cakes. As an adult, he continued singing for higher stakes and moved to Durban, where he joined a professional group.

“Then I had a dream visitation,” he said. “Ever since I’d heard my father singing this type of music, I knew it was a good music, but my ears, my mind, my veins told me that something was missing somewhere. Then in 1964 I was sleeping and I saw children singing.

“First I just heard the sound . . . then I started to see who was singing. I can’t say if they were white or black, but that they were children. There is a stage, but they are floating between the stage and the sky, just singing. They wanted to show me how to follow the action with my harmony, how to follow the harmony with action.

“They were singing a strange language. I don’t know it, and wherever I’ve traveled now, it’s not like that language. I failed to catch it, but I caught the harmony and the melody, and I’ve copied it to make our music.”

It was another dream that led him to form Ladysmith Black Mambazo in 1969 (the name means “black ax,” referring to the group cutting down its competition). “My previous group didn’t like to get exactly the right sound. They were very happy of winning, of people clapping hands for them. But when I taught them that we must develop our music, they said, ‘No, that’s enough. That’s too hard.’

“Then my grandmother came to me in a dream and said, ‘All right, I discovered that these guys are worrying you. Just go to your brothers and sing with them.’ I’d been singing with this other group for six years, but that’s what I did. I’ve had many dreams, and I know how to follow the good ones,” Shabalala said.

His songs range from reflections on community life, which can be alternately comic or filled with yearning, to hymns expressing his Christian faith. His lyrics rarely directly confront the system of apartheid under which he and all black South Africans live, though its effects are implicit in many songs: in a ballad expressing the loneliness of a husband forced to seek work away from his family for years at a time; in a song praising the repeal of South African pass laws; in Simon’s and Shabalala’s “Homeless,” expressing the sorrow of a dispossessed people.

Were Shabalala’s lyrics more politically explicit, they would almost certainly come up against South Africa’s harsh censorship laws, but he said that isn’t the reason for the songs’ lack of confrontational content. He sees his music as following a spiritual rather than political path.

Asked how he can create such peaceful music in such a troubled place, he said, “That’s why we sing as we do. All the time when you want to comfort yourself, you must sing a nice song for you, a song to appease something, to worship God--which means you are worried . . . that song-came-from-heart. In South Africa, we are a people who don’t write music. We hear music”--Shabalala touched his chest--”and then we sing music. It comes from the heart, from loneliness, grief, something like that.

“To share music with other people, I feel this is the only thing to conquer everything because I think even God likes music. Now when we love each other by sharing our ideas, I think everything will be OK all over the world.”

Shabalala thinks that he will see the fruition of such beliefs in his lifetime and points to a recent homecoming concert the group performed in Ladysmith’s town hall.

“That was amazing to see,” he said. “My people were very happy because it was the first time there to see black and white together in one hall. That never happened with an audience there before. People told me, ‘Since you sang there, we feel like other people.’ That’s why I say music is the only thing which can make people love each other. It is the universal language.”

Before meeting Paul Simon, Shabalala’s only exposure to his music had been hearing a neighbor’s copy of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” single. They met in 1985, when Simon was in South Africa enlisting musicians for the “Graceland” album. Simon’s first words were, “Joseph, I’m a fan of yours.” What impressed Shabalala about the compliment wasn’t that it was coming from a star of Simon’s magnitude, but rather, “It was amazing to me that Black Mambazo had a fan in America.”

Unlike the high-level wrangling between lawyers that precedes most modern musical collaborations, the meeting between Shabalala and Simon was fairly direct: “When he said he was a fan, I said, ‘Thank you very much.’ He said, ‘I’d like to do something with you, a song.’ I said, ‘Oh, yes.’ He said, ‘All right, I’ll let you know where and when.’ ”

In addition to their collaboration on “Graceland,” Simon produced the “Shaka Zulu” album and sings with the group on “Amazing Grace” on the new album. As to whether they will work together again, Shabalala said, “He told me, ‘If you’ve got something, tell me,’ and I said the same to him.”

Clearly, Shabalala believes that Ladysmith Black Mambazo has “got something” on the new album, something that explains the “Journey of Dreams” title.

“When I rehearsed the group for these songs,” Shabalala said, “I feel that they caught exactly what I caught from that dream long ago.”

Ladysmith Black Mambazo plays today at 9 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $21.50. Information: (714) 496-8930.