Wouter Kellerman talks about music collabos and his journey as a flautist on the international stage

Some South Africans first heard the name of Wouter Kellerman during the Grammy season because Mzansi walked away as a winner in one of the categories.

But being in the industry for more than 20 years, Wouter is not surprised that he is not known to some. 

“It is a niche market, I've been playing my music which is not pop music usually, so it's quite normal for people not to know me because people who listen to pop music all the time might not know my music. Though I'm very curious about different music and I spread my genres. My four Grammy nominations are in three different categories, there's New Age, there's Global/ World Music and there's Contemporary Instrumental Music so those are the three categories that I have been nominated in and won in. So my interests are very wide and I don't stick to my genre. 

“I have been doing some mainstream things as well, and I'm hoping to bridge the gap and reach out and for people to discover that instrumental music is not necessarily boring and actually sometimes you can say more without using words. You can say things that words can't say.”

He said he picked up the flute when he was a young boy and has never put it down, even though he had to put music on pause when he studied engineering and again when he put his children through school.

“When I picked up the flute I was already keen and eager and I had this encouraging teacher who was truly lovely and I just fell in love with it. I played a lot of classical music throughout school and when I left school I wanted to study music but we didn't have money and I couldn't get a bursary or scholarship in music but I was offered a bursary to study engineering. That's my other talent — physics and maths. My passion was to make music and after a couple of years I decided to do music full time.”

Wouter said as a flautist he enjoys collaborating with many artists and his mission is to export South African music to the world. 

“I'm completely in love with the richness, and the culture that we have here and I don't think people overseas know enough about it. We've got a lot to share and I think the whole world would be enriched if we do more sharing.”

“I do a lot of collaborations. The flute is a kind of a collaboration friendly instrument. Its kind of inherently collaborative, because you want a vocalist or other musicians to play with. I've done a lot of collaborations and the Grammy win in 2015 was with an Indian composer, so it was  South African/Indian album.”

Wouter is a multiple Sama and Grammy winner and boasts many collaborations.

“I've done a lot of collaborations I think going backwards until now. I've done collaborations with David Arkenstone who's a legend in the new age genre and he also writes music for computer games and is a very well-known writer. That was a beautiful collaboration. Then the Ndlovu Youth Choir we discovered them and then tried to help them by broadcasting their talents to the world. There was a song they did that managed to go viral and America's Got Talent saw them and asked them to enter the competition. That was he trigger that set up the whole thing. I've been trying to do the same thing with Mzansi Youth Choir. We did two songs together, I'm hoping the same thing with them because they are incredible.”

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