Wouter Kellerman’s journey to the Grammys and reaching his ultimate goals

When he packed up his career as an electrical engineer who owned his own company for one as a flutist, Wouter Kellerman had a list of things he wanted to achieve and winning a Grammy Award was one of them.

Wouter, Nomcebo Zikode and Zakes Bantwini recently won the Best Global Music Performance for their collaboration Bayethe at the 65th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles.

With nine albums, eight Samas and two Grammys, Wouter said this one was special because it was voted for by creatives.

"You are voted for by your peers. It's either musicians, engineers, producers and creators. I think there's about 12,000 voting members in the Grammy community. That's what makes this award so special because its not the public, it is a more knowledgeable audience.

"It makes it more special because they are not voting for our popularity. That's why our song was able to win ahead of Burna Boy, who is a superstar. He was nominated in the same category. He is a superstar and super popular but our peers voted and said 'we listened to both songs and we vote for this one'."

He said the category in which they won was originally called Best World Music before it was changed to be inclusive of cross-cultural pop music.

"The musicians would be listening for creativity, depth and musicianship, which is not  necessarily what the public would listen for. Also, the musicians would be unswayed in an imperfect world by hype and social media. The brief to the Grammy voting community is to listen to the music and not pay attention to popularity."

For 10 years Wouter has travelled overseas every year, attending master classes and learning from the world’s best flute teachers including William Bennett, Peter-Lukas Graf, Trevor Wye, Julius Baker and Susan Milan.

"When I made my crossover to music from engineering I was sitting around the kitchen table with my kids and they said "Dad, what do you want to achieve?'. The first thing I said was that one day I would like to go for a Grammy nomination because in the acting world there are Oscars, Emmys and Cannes Film Festival but in the music world the only real international global award is the Grammys. It is the highest you can achieve and I love dreaming. I thought that would be the ultimate goal.

"The second item on my bucket list was to represent South Africa at one of these huge events like a World Cup, and that also happened. I played at the soccer World Cup closing ceremony for 700-million people. It was really amazing for a flute player. "

In 2015, he won a Grammy Award for Best New Age, Ambient or Chant Album for his album for Winds of Samsara.

"When I wasn't touring in the US I started asking people how to enter something for a Grammy. What do you do? And we started entering. The first six years we entered nothing happened. We had beautiful projects and I always thought, because I'm obsessed with quality, I will redo music until I'm 100% happy with it, every split second of it.

"We discovered after a few years it is not enough to enter it, you have to really promote it because there are more than 20,000 entries every year and nobody is going to listen to 20,000 songs or albums. It's impossible, so you have to be out there so people know about your music and listen to it.

"The first and most important piece of the puzzle is to make the quality music, and the second piece is to promote it. That's an essential part".