SOUTH AFRICAN JAZZ KNEW NO COLOR.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

The beaches were for ``whites only.'' Ditto the restrooms, the theaters and pretty much everything else when Jonathan Butler was growing up outside Cape Town, South Africa.

Everything, that is, except the music, a funky aural intoxicant spilling out of open windows and passing cars onto the tense streets of the black Athlone township.

In those days, Butler lived for the sounds of Charles Mingus and Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorius and Joni Mitchell (in her '70s jazz-jive period). He fell in with a group of Johannesburg jazz players who worshiped Milton Nascimento, Sergio Mendes, Donny Hathaway, Tom Scott and Stevie Wonder.

The young prodigy quickly adopted both their music and their lifestyle as his own.

``These people baptized me,'' Butler recalled recently. ``I was 13, 14 when I met these guys in Johannesburg, and I fell in love with those guys. I was taken in by these musicians whose lifestyle, I would say, was jazz. These guys were living on brown bread and black tea, and they were playing to audiences who had not come to hear them play.''

That surely won't be the case Friday when Butler will perform with one of his former mentors at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater. The South African guitarist/singer/songwriter will be teamed with saxophonist Tom Scott and r&b vocalist Lalah Hathaway, Donny Hathaway's daughter, in ``Smooth Jazz Christmas,'' billed as a program of ``smooth jazz holiday favorites.''

That inordinately mellow-sounding phrase contrasts sharply with Butler's own upbringing as a South African musician.

South African scene

When Butler came of age, jazz was simply one ingredient in a yeasty brew that also included British and American pop, West Indian reggae and Brazilian carnivale music. Heard within the context of South African racial politics, this music became a touchstone of black consciousness, a Pan-African soul-fusion that didn't lend itself to generic marketing labels.

To this day, Butler finds those labels strange and confining.

``I'm quite shocked when I hear these terms: He's an `adult contemporary artist,' or `he's smooth jazz,' '' he says.

Butler also questions the wisdom of removing jazz from the streets and placing it in concert halls and night clubs.

``Sometimes you get into markets where you see jazz guys wearing ties and suits, and I say, `What is this? What does this represent?' Maybe it's because I'm from South Africa, but anything that's exclusive, I'm against.''

Far from being exclusive, Butler's background was all too typical of the conditions for black South Africans under apartheid.

Raised in the township slums, he shared a three-bedroom shack with his 13 brothers and sisters, plus a few cousins. At age 7, he left home to perform in a Broadway-style musical review for white South Africans. He'd alternate those appearances with gigs at packed, blacks-only venues. Before he reached adolescence, he was leading a double life, traveling by late-night bus from show to show, torn between a promising personal future and a brutally oppressive society.

A big break

At age 12, Butler was discovered by record producer Clive Caulder and promptly cut his first hit single - one of the first songs by a black artist to get airplay on white radio stations. Later he won a Sarie Award, South Africa's equivalent of a Grammy.

Butler came to international attention after moving to London in the mid-'80s and signing with Jive Records. His self-titled breakthrough album produced the Grammy-nominated pop hit ``Lies.'' Soon, Butler soon found himself collaborating with the likes of George Benson, Billy Ocean and Angela Bofill.

Two years ago he moved to L.A., a place he finds congenial both physically and artistically.

``As a South African, (this) is very much the climate I'm used to. I love the sunsets and the beaches, I love the flowers that come out.''

But now when he visits South Africa, he worries that the culture of his adopted country may overwhelm the new, liberated homeland.

``If you go there, the kids look like Americans and imitate everything that comes from the States, and that has put the local jazz on the back burner,'' he says.

``I still see a great lack in terms of government commitment (in South Africa) to the arts because a lot of the people I worked with are really struggling. They're still relying on donated instruments, and they're the next Herbie Hancock and John Coltrane or whatever, and a lot of them have lost heart and are drug addicts.''

Although he escaped that destiny, Butler still sees himself as ``an unschooled person'' who never studied music and can't read it very well.

After all these years, he remains at heart a street player.

``Maybe I'm just an old-fashioned musician from the `can-you-whistle-it?' school. If you can you whistle it, can you play it? That's how I grew up playing. And I'm still holding onto it for dear life.''

THE FACTS

What: Jonathan Butler, appearing in Tom Scott's ``Smooth Jazz Christmas.''

Where: Veterans Wadsworth Theater, on the Veterans Administration grounds, Wilshire Boulevard at Bonsall Avenue, Westwood.

When: 8 tonight.

Tickets: $30 and $27; $9 for UCLA students with full-time ID. Call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: Guitarist and singer Jonathan Butler grew up listening and performing the jazz of the streets in his black township in South Africa.