As a boy growing up outside Pretoria, South Africa, Vusi Mahlasela might have seemed an unlikely candidate to become one of that country’s best-known musicians.
But maybe his ambition should have made the future clear. He taught himself how to play guitar with a handmade instrument that he constructed out of fishing line and tin cans.
From that start, Mahlasela has transformed himself into one of South Africa’s most well-known artists and strongest voices in the anti-apartheid movement. Today Mahlasela’s sound and stage persona is so distinctive that he is known in his native country as simply “The Voice.”
“People know me and my music for instilling hope. There is always something to talk about with the times changing around you and the people around you,” Mahlasela said in a telephone interview from his home in Mamelodi. “But now my music has changed in some ways, because one needs to develop as an artist. I’m not only writing about South Africa but also about the continent of Africa as well.”
His broader aims are reflected in his popularity, which is beginning to spread beyond Africa, particularly with the success of the film “Tsotsi,” a South African film that won the 2005 best foreign film Oscar, for which Mahlasela wrote the soundtrack.
On Thursday, he kicks off a month-long tour of concerts and music festivals in the United States and Europe with a performance in Denver. His tour will include performances at Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD fest in Reading, England, and Les Nuits Atypiques de Langon, in Langon, France.
Beyond winning the Oscar, “Tsotsi” – the story of a young gangster who hijacks a car, only to discover an infant in the back seat – also has won critical acclaim for its music, which introduces the driving force and beat of “kwaito,” South Africa’s homegrown corollary of hip-hop. The rebelliousness, linguistic machinations and bravado of kwaito are perfectly complemented by Mahlasela’s spiritual soprano, and deeply emotional, ambient meditations reflecting the conscience of the film.
The “Tsotsi” soundtrack also includes “Silang Mabele,” one of Mahlasela’s most popular songs, a traditional African melody about work and grinding corn, which Mahlasela reinvented into a call for the world to work on ending poverty.
On his new as-yet-untitled album, Mahlasela said, some of the music is about the historic dispossession of the indigenous San people of southern Africa, and particularly their oppression by the government of Botswana, which has been accused of destroying their identity and means for survival.
Mahlasela, who is known for a dreamy acoustic sound and subtle African rhythms blended with deep, resonant vocal harmonies, spoke enthusiastically about his new CD, due out in the fall.
“The new album is concentrated on much more than just the acoustic sound of me and my voice,” he said of the project, which includes collaborations with some of South Africa’s top recording artists, such as Lady- smith Black Mambazo, Hugh Masekela and the Soul Brothers.
“It’s sort of like the songs directed themselves where they wanted to go,” he said.
The CD has generated a lot of buzz in South Africa’s music community.
“Lately we’ve found there are quite a lot of musicians who want to come and participate. Every song is demanding.”
Mahlasela was recently persuaded by his good friend Dave Matthews (who also is South African) to sign with Matthews’ ATO label, giving him new visibility in North America and Europe. In 2003, ATO produced The Voice, a collection of some of Mahlasela’s best work, compiled with an eye toward broadening Mahlasela’s appeal as an international performer.
Mahlasela is developing his new album with his long-time producer Lloyd Ross. Given the tremendous range of styles, genres and musicians in South Africa, Mahlasela and Ross have learned to work together to find the right artists for different productions, and at times they take their recording equipment into outlying rural communities to capture traditional music and instrumentation.
“Most of the time I know there are certain people I want to work with for the album or on various songs. And maybe Lloyd also will know people who know how to do certain things for a sound that I think should be there,” Mahlasela said. “If there’s something we’re looking for and I don’t know how to create it, maybe the producer knows and he will have the connection. It develops by working together.”
| Vusi Mahlasela
WORLD MUSIC|First Divine Science Church, 1400 Williams St., 7 p.m. Thursday; presented by Swallow Hill Music Association |$15, members, $18, public|Tickets at swallowhill.com.
