Fantasy is reality for SA's magic flautist

In 1971 Pieter Kellerman, a banker, and his wife, Susan, a chemist, took their 10-year-old son, Wouter, to a symphony concert.

Afterwards they asked the excited boy which instrument he'd like to play. He chose the flute and, remembering it now, he thinks that as soon as he got the instrument he took it to his room and "played" it for three hours.

He grew up wanting to be like the gold-flute-playing classical flautist James Galway or Jethro Tull's crazy-eyed, prancing frontman, Ian Anderson.

In 1981, his dreams looked like becoming reality when he appeared as a soloist with the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra.

However, Kellerman, who studied engineering at the Rand Afrikaans University (now the University of Johannesburg), where he also excelled at table tennis, had married early and had two children to support.

He started his own engineering company but found that, in-between that and raising his son and daughter after his divorce, there was little time to work on his flute playing.

He would take a year off, try and work on his music full time, run out of money and go back to engineering. His children grew up and now live in Melbourne. At the young age of 53, he's just become a grandfather.

He's also just won a Grammy, together with Indian musician Ricky Kej for Winds of Samsara, voted best New Age album of the year - but we'll get to that.

In his 40s, Kellerman left engineering behind and decided to put everything into realising his dream of being a professional musician. He started to compose his own music, drawing on his wide tastes to self-produce an album of eclectic pieces ranging from Irish music to tangos and African songs.

It was hard to get any major labels interested in the album. As he recalls: "Nobody wanted to release me because they didn't know me; I was only known as a classical flautist.

"I first went to the majors, but I couldn't even get them to listen. So I just did it myself and found a distributor who was kind enough to let me distribute through them."

The album, mixed by world-renowned sound engineer Husky Höskulds - who mixed Norah Jones's 2002 Grammy smasher Come Away With Me - was called Colour and was nominated for a 2008 South African Music Award for best instrumental album.

After that, things started to get a little easier and in 2010 Kellerman won a Sama for the DVD of his Colour show, followed up by a Sama for best instrumental album for Two Voices in 2011.

He played at the closing ceremony of the 2010 Soccer World Cup and over the past nine years his flute has taken him around the world - from Shanghai to France, Berlin, New York, the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles and to Australia, where he can combine touring commitments with visits to his children. He's also got to indulge his love of tennis by watching live matches at each of the sport's grand slam tournaments.

Kellerman admits that he's an ambitious person. "I put it out there as a goal, not to achieve in a certain time frame but just something I'd like to do at a certain stage and I find that if I just keep it in my mind, eventually it happens."

Together with his best friend Tholsi Pillay, who quit her job as a labour lawyer to become his manager, Kellerman spends two-thirds of the year travelling.

When we meet, he's just stepped off a 28-hour flight from LA, where he won that Grammy. Unfortunately, his father didn't live to see his son achieve music's highest accolade - Pieter died in 2013 at the age of 85, after being seriously injured during a house robbery.

In person, Kellerman is tall, lean and soft-spoken. He says: "The Grammys have just got that little sizzle to them - it's the highest prize you could achieve and it has got all that glitz and glamour and you dress up in your best tux and it's an honour to be acknowledged by your peers."

Winds of Samsara, which Kellerman has described as a meeting of the teachings of Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi - came about when he met New Age producer and musician Kej online and played some flute on one of the Indian artist's tracks.

"[It's] a meditative album - music that you can listen to while you're meditating. Playing the flute is very meditative, so my meditation is playing the flute, because you do deep breathing and I do a lot of long notes, where I focus on the sound. If I don't play for a few days, I really start feeling a bit off, so that's my meditation, and I do yoga," says Kellerman.

If you add up the string sections and choirs and other musicians, the album took 120 people's contributions to make. It was recorded on five continents. What made the album different for Kellerman, besides the change in genre and the size of the project, was the level of marketing that he and Kej put behind it. He usually spends "so much effort in making the album because I'm a compulsive perfectionist", he says. "This year we matched that with the marketing, and that's the first time we've done that, and that really has worked."

They played 20 cities in the US last year and the album went to No1 on the Billboard New Age chart and grabbed the genre's top download spot on iTunes. In April, Kellerman, Kej and the full ensemble of musicians who worked on the album will perform it in India for the recording of a live DVD, which Kellerman describes as "a huge production" and his "most ambitious project so far".

He'll also tour the world and wants to finish the solo album that he put aside to work on Samsara.

"There's a nice, busy, full year ahead and I'm basically going to be working day and night until July, and then I'm hoping to take a few days off after that."

If one of those days is a Friday, he'll be with his family at his mother's house, eating a home-cooked meal and playing bridge. In the meantime, he's putting some new ambitions out there.

"I'd love to do a duet with Norah Jones, play the Sydney Opera House and some of the European venues I haven't played."

These things, though, just happen by the way. "I just want to make beautiful music and have people appreciate it," says Kellerman before heading off to continue an interview schedule that won't get him home to Fern-dale until after dark.

As Kellerman leaves, I ask Pillay whether managing her best friend means that they fight more or less than they would otherwise. "More," quips Kellerman. "Sometimes she forgets that I'm the boss."

So where will the Grammy go? "In my office," says Pillay.