A one take, fluke demo that has never been recorded again turned into the “Circle of Life’s” opening line, “Nants ingonyama, bagithi Baba”, which is undeniably one of the most recognized lines/songs of any movie and musical.
Twenty five years ago, Lebo M. (African Music Consultant/Performer/choral arranger and conductor/songwriter) was called in to record a demo song for a project he knew nothing about except how the movie would start. He conceptualized, arranged, and built “the entire frontend of the song.” In speaking exclusively with Blackfilm.com correspondent Paula Dofat, Lebo recalled, “As I was leaving the studio I saw the image (Mufasa), heard the cords and progressions and I was really into this thing. So I said, ‘turn the mic back on.’ And then I said what I normally would or quite frankly what any South African normally would (in the presence of a king) except I vocalized it. The psychology and the emotion of it is ‘All hail the King’ and all bow down in the presence of the royal family.”
I left and went back to South Africa and received a call three months later saying, “We want to talk to you about this project called The Lion King. The demo was absolutely amazing and of course we know you work with Hans Zimmer (composer and Academy Award winner for Best Original Score for The Lion King in 1995).” Lebo M. expressed, at the time, he did not know what project they were referring to because he and Zimmer were working on multiple projects but he said yes anyway because, “who turns down a job,” he recalled laughingly. He went back into the recording studio and tried four or five takes but Lebo M. said, “it never felt natural so we left it alone” and he and Zimmer decided to keep the vocals from the original unrehearsed demo.
Little did Lebo M. know or anyone for that matter that The Lion King, originally released in 1994 would win Academy Awards, be adapted to a Broadway musical that has been running for 21 years along with 25 global musical productions with 6 of them running 15 years or more all starting with Lebo M.’s opening line would afford him income, work, and notoriety for the last 25 years and what looks to be the next 25 years and beyond with the new live-action movie to be released on July 19, 2019.
“As a child born into an apartheid South Africa, your options and choices were very limited. You had boxing, and I was horrible at it, soccer was your next choice, from there you want to be a criminal or you’re going to go to exile and be a politician and go fight white people and take over the country,” Lebo M. recalls. He did not fare well at boxing or soccer and the other two options were out of the question. Lebo M. accidentally “fell into Youth Club” where music was promoted and he fell in love.
He came to America in exile in 1979 and shares that before he moved to Los Angeles he was “adopted by Black churches and everything that had music I would go. Let me see, I can get some food here but they also have a band and a choir. I was in the youth choir. My first experience was in Washington DC before I got into the Duke Ellington School of the Arts I became a church member at Union Temple Baptist Church in DC. Everything with music was good.”
From there he ended up in Los Angeles, “I had hard times on the streets, 2 ½ years or more homeless. But I’m from South Africa and there’s no such thing as homeless; you just persevere,” explains Lebo M. “My dream was to be the next big R&B superstar because Marvin Gaye was my greatest hero. The idea that one day I would end up in the place called United States of America which we (South Africans) all knew as heaven then was real to some of us. Especially when I had the chance to go to exile and you come to America and you realize that the Utopia of America that you had in your upbringing is the exact opposite.
So your culture shock is actually trauma because they have poor people here. So everything I left at home for this dream of this heaven was here too. But you end up keeping the dream because you have to stay alive. You have to keep yourself a human being that is always conscious that you left the worst political environment in the history of mankind. So whatever it is that you are facing you’re going to be a better person. Whether I ended up being a professional taxi driver I had to be constantly dreaming and working in my head and see myself as a successful professional in something that had do with the arts.”
That obviously paid off and paid off well because Lebo M. shares how his association with The Lion King impacted and impacts him and others, “I was probably the first or second person Julie Taymor (Director, The Lion King – the musical) sat with to conceptualize the Broadway production and the only person that physically came from the movie. So I have been traveling around the world and living this project. This is the most important thing I think I could experience in my entire life and for the rest of my life to see what a project that has emotion can do to people.
Just experiencing the first 2 ½ minutes of The Lion King over and over I can never say I’m familiar with it because I see human beings interaction from a spiritual and emotional level and I have something to do with it. So it’s always fresh and so there is no other reward that I am looking forward to because I have already experienced that in many different ways. I’m always faced with, ‘Wow you are my childhood!’ I don’t think people can be as blessed as us to go anywhere in the world and hear the same thing and feel apart of the global community through (their) work.”
Reflecting on the last 25 years Lebo M. sums it up, “We have been blessed that this project keeps reinventing itself. I was looking just today and we (Hans Zimmer and I) are the only two people” from the original movie who are working on the new live action The Lion King. The greatest gift is to be able to re-enter a journey that has been in your life for 25 years. As I watch the new movie I think, ‘How blessed can one be that a one take demo will out live the previous 25 years?”
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